Google Caught Misbehaving By Kenyan Startup 383
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the hand-in-cookie-jar dept.
from the hand-in-cookie-jar dept.
An anonymous reader sends in an interesting story from Mocality, a company that painstakingly built a business directory in Kenya. When they discovered that somebody was systematically harvesting the contact information they'd collected (and after a few very odd phone calls from confused Kenyan business owners), they set up a sting to see what was really going on. They swapped out the phone numbers listed for a few businesses with phone numbers in their own call centers, and then waited to see who called. Mocality was shocked to discover it was Google Kenya, who falsely claimed a business collaboration with Mocality, and then lied about Mocality's business practices.
Re:Legal ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can we get a better source? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Real or fake? (Score:5, Informative)
There were no further accesses from the IP address 41.203.221.138 after 4pm 23rd December. Co-incidence? or had someone realised we were onto them?
However, there were some NEW strange messages from business owners- theyâ(TM)d apparently been contacted by a call centre in India with the same promise of a website.
NetRange: 74.125.0.0 - 74.125.255.255
CIDR: 74.125.0.0/16
OriginAS:
NetName: GOOGLE
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Informative)
OrgId: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
That just indicates that the network is registered under Google CA, not that any authorisation for the activity going over that network is. The only thing we can really infer is that the operation is larger than _just_ the Kenyan office, but whether that's some Kenyan dude calling his buddy in India to do him a favour, or the CEO of Google personally masterminding an eeeeeevil takeover of everything, is anybody's guess. Probably somewhere in between.
To the people stating this is fake... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Informative)
Ip's can be hijacked (Score:5, Informative)
IP address ownership, sadly, doesn't prove anything. Anyone with a BGP connection can hijack any IP address for large parts of the world. And before you say "but surely Google can prevent this" :
Read this [renesys.com]
I've been the admin on 3 networks which were IP hijacked now. In two cases it was accidental, in a third case it was not. The situation is bad in North America, seriously disappointing in Western Europe, and beyond outrageous everywhere else. Basically, outside of North America and Europe you can pretty much assume anyone can hijack anything they want. Inside "the West" you have to be a carrier, a transit provider with a few hundred customers. Which sounds good, until you realize there's over 500 such organizations in North America alone.
Re:Ip's can be hijacked (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:3, Informative)
"The bad press and legal repercussions would outweigh the licensing costs."
Re:The whole thing seems a bit off (Score:2, Informative)
This is more than a bit unusual for a UA, it's a mismatched spoof.
For the record, it is a standard Chrome UA. For example, I have:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.75 Safari/535.7
(I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:2, Informative)
Please, stop boasting about your knowledge of the law if you are totally unable to understand it.
Corporations are legal persons which mean they are seen as a person in their own right and not only as a group of persons.
What it means is that Google can be guilty of something and by Google, I mean, the legal person that is Google, not Eric Schmidt or the guy who held the phone. So, if someone from Google Kenya knew, Google Kenya knew not necessary its CEO not even talking about the international CEO.
Where it becomes even more tricky is that Google Kenya and Google corporation are both legal persons with interactions regulated by a contract which means Google Kenya can be guilty and Google not. But, when you think about it for more than two minutes, it perfectly makes sense because after all they are not subject to the same law.
Re:Response (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. The Register [theregister.co.uk] asked them and they said:
"We're aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible."
Note that they are already trying to duck the fraud and focus on the less serious "use of publicly available information" part.
Re:That is Google KENYA's responsibility. (Score:2, Informative)
google wouldnt. but, people employed in google russia, definitely would. bribe or die ? anyone would choose bribe. that does not mean that google ireland is approving it. they end up approving it if they dont take action on it.
Look, it's unity100 being a moron again.
"Google" is a corporation - an entity made up of many people, including its employees. When an employee does something wrong, Google does something wrong.
Something viewed as wrong here doesn't get a pass because it happened somewhere else where that behavior is still wrong but is more common.
Google's burning villages and eating puppies? Well, it's Africa, I guess that's just their culture.
Only on slashdot!
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:3, Informative)
And Google also calls people when they are interested in providing some services to them. What is news about that? I've talked with them over the phone and in email. Of course, you need to do some actual business with Google and not merely use their search engine, but there is nothing new about this.