Google Caught Misbehaving By Kenyan Startup 383
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.
Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFA:
On this call (first 2 minutes) you can clearly hear Douglas identify himself as Google Kenya employee, state, and then reaffirm, that GKBO is working in collaboration with Mocality, and that we are helping them with GKBO, before trying to offer the business owner a website (and upsell them a domain name). Over the 11 minutes of the whole call he repeatedly states that Mocality is with, or under (!) Google.
If the allegations in this article are true, this is where they really cross the line. Harvesting a publicly available database and then contacting those businesses to sell them something is fine (though a little sleazy for a mainstream business like Google). But then trying to claim that you're working with that company when you're not is just plain fraud. It would be like some random insurance company calling people up and saying "Hi, we're working with your mortgage holder, Bank of Topeka, and would like to offer you a special insurance deal...in conjunction with Bank of Topeka."
In fact, Mocality found out about this whole scam when customers started calling them up and asking for support for their new websites (thinking Mocality were the ones who had sold them the sites). I guess it never occurred to Google that this would happen and that Mocality would want to know why.
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Note the key words, "Google Kenya" - this is a branch office where some employee is taking a shortcut. This is hardly a condemnation of Google as a company unless and until it's demonstrated that this is either more than an isolated incident or was based on instructions received from corporate overlords.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if the same excuse-making would apply if this had been Bing/Microsoft?
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
sometime a group; in a large organization will do something wrong. sometime by accident, sometime on purpose. How the company overall handles it is the critical issues, as well as the behavior going forward.
ti's not an excuse, its reasonable.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly I don't see much difference between Google and Microsoft's corporatism and anti-competitive practices, except that Microsoft has had a 20 year head start.
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Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
That is the 20 year head start thing again. To do so, helps Google gain market share NOW. Come back with this talk in 20 years. My prediction is, that by 2020 we hate Google more than we hate msft now.
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I already hate it more than msft...
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Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
In some ways, it kinda does indict the entire organization.... the entire brand anyway.
The personality and integrity of a company is an important and even critical asset and must be guarded and maintained. If Google made the mistake of using the people behind this problem, they put their brand and image in serious jeopardy. Like it or not (call it racism if you want) certain parts of the world exist where lies and deceit are built-in to the game. China is built around bribes and crap like that and US companies are routinely called onto the floor for "doing business" with Chinese people in the way the Chinese people expect.
Sometimes competition is a race to the top. Sometimes, it's a race to the bottom... it's a race to whatever practice yields the best results.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that Google as a whole is responsible for the actions of its individual branches, but it's how Google responds to the accusation that determines whether Google condones the behavior, not whether Google was able to proactively micromanage branch offices.
I don't buy your theory that because an Indian call center was involved, this automatically makes it an action blessed by corporate. Branch offices have their own budgets and discretionary spending. Maybe it was Eric Schmidt himself who told them to do this. But we really have no way of knowing, and it's a simpler explanation that one or a few employees were engaged in taking shortcuts than that Google corporate issues orders to branch offices which involve instructions to illegally misrepresent a business relationship.
Or maybe it was the Indian call center themselves who took this "initiative" and decided to lie about the relationship (that would certainly be consistent with when we fired a call center for overtly lying to our customers to shorten call times).
I'll side with Occam's Razor on this. If corporate wanted this information this badly, they'd have paid for it. The bad press and legal repercussions would outweigh the licensing costs.
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I'll side with Occam's Razor on this. If corporate wanted this information this badly, they'd have paid for it.
Since when is that a corporation's preferred course of action...?
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"The bad press and legal repercussions would outweigh the licensing costs."
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Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Not sure what's going on here, as a user-agent string means nothing, and there's a lot of outsourcing going on. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the investigation Mocality did, and for the tools they have, it was fairly sophisticated.
What I'd like to know is how Google reacts to this. I'm generally of the opinion that someone is innocent until proven guilty (I've been wrong too many times to be able to still jump to conclusions). This might just be a lot of smoke without fire, but if Google is s
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
However, when things like this happen, it's usually worthwhile to figure out whether the bad behavior was isolated to a single person, a single department, a single branch, or whether it's a common part of the company's internal culture, or even a company-wide policy. The point being that if we can reliably determine that it was a small subset of the company behaving badly, and the company removes the offending parties, then you can reasonably keep interacting with the company (albeit with more vigilance than you were before). If, on the other hand, it's clear that this was part of a company-wide pattern, then you should reasonably stop trusting the company as a whole.
To be clear: it's not a matter of absolving the parent company from responsibility (they are indeed responsible for everything their subsidiaries and employees do). It's about coming up with valid predictions about how likely this company is to be a repeat offender.
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Compare and Contrast with News Corp's News of the World Phone Tapping/Hacking/Listening to Voicemail scandal which went all the way up to Murdochs Dragon-in-chief.
That was something that was endemic and part of the corporate culture and was rightfully put down in the face of it. An enquiry is underway to see if it permeated any of the other newspapers under the control of News Corp.
If said Phone Hacking was actually only an isolated incident, or restricted to one or two reporters, they would rightly be fire
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
revised motto: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Informative)
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You seem to be advocating stopping the story here and declaring Google pure evil full stop. I prefer a bit more nuance in my analysis.
Came through, but not necessarily from (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Note the key words, "Google Kenya" - this is a branch office where some employee is taking a shortcut. This is hardly a condemnation of Google as a company unless and until it's demonstrated that this is either more than an isolated incident or was based on instructions received from corporate overlords.
As other responses pointed out, this went beyond Google Kenya, so your point is invalid. Moreover, even if it were simply Google Kenya, I find your attitude to be terribly naive. If we don't hold parent companies/politicians/military leaders/whatever responsible for the actions of their subordinates and default to the notion that every negative act is that of a rogue, corrupt underling, we nearly eliminate the concept of institutional responsibility. The burden of proof in this sort of situation should be on the institution - there's no reason to assume that an incident was out of line with company policy until proven otherwise.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Informative)
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Note the key words, "Google Kenya" - this is a branch office where some employee is taking a shortcut. This is hardly a condemnation of Google as a company unless and until it's demonstrated that this is either more than an isolated incident or was based on instructions received from corporate overlords.
As other responses pointed out, this went beyond Google Kenya, so your point is invalid. Moreover, even if it were simply Google Kenya, I find your attitude to be terribly naive. If we don't hold parent companies/politicians/military leaders/whatever responsible for the actions of their subordinates and default to the notion that every negative act is that of a rogue, corrupt underling, we nearly eliminate the concept of institutional responsibility. The burden of proof in this sort of situation should be on the institution - there's no reason to assume that an incident was out of line with company policy until proven otherwise.
I suppose you are also ready to condemn the complete rank of the US armed forces, all 1,400,000 of them, as deplorable corpse-pissers?
A chain of responsibility is one (important) thing but if you don't take the whole of the org's history into account when looking at one incident, you are stereotyping the entire group for the (possibly independent) actions of one tiny part of it. We have learned several times in history that stereotyping does not work, facts win in the long run and for the time being anyway
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Note the key words, "Google Kenya" - this is a branch office where some employee is taking a shortcut.
Doesn't matter. If some McDonalds somewhere in the world is serving people maggoty burgers, the parent company is going to want to know who and shut them down right away. There are certain responsibilities you get when you let other people use your name, specifically it's still up to you to protect your reputation by not making franchise agreements with arse-holes.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
A superior's excuse excuse is, "I was out of the loop."
Neither is acceptable.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither is acceptable
Except that each those is often exactly true. In the "just following orders" situation, you go up the food chain until you find out who issued them. In the "I was out of the loop" scenario, you go down the food chain until you find out where the loop's boundaries are.
... what, should your entire organization, all the way to the top of the org chart be destroyed? Really?
What does "unacceptable" mean to you? If someone subordinate to you does something of which you would not approve, and about which you did not know
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Note the key words, "Google Kenya" - this is a branch office where some employee is taking a shortcut. This is hardly a condemnation of Google as a company unless and until it's demonstrated that this is either more than an isolated incident or was based on instructions received from corporate overlords.
But was it really Google or was it someone else pretending to be Google?
I suspect this was just a scammer abusing google's good name to sell domain names or whatever.
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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.
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Re:Ip's can be hijacked (Score:5, Informative)
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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- theyÃ(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:4, Insightful)
Set aside questions of branding and PR, and set aside whether or not some mysterious, shadowy figure in Mountainview signed the order to go ahead. That it happened at all either suggests that Google's corporate culture is so venal and corrupt that Google-Kenya thought that it was acceptable, or that Google is so incompetent and muddled that they're not capable of articulating their legitimate culture to their own employees and contractors.
With the Google Chrome advertising dustup a couple weeks back, it could be either, but neither is particularly good and neither should free them of "condemnation of Google as a company."
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I have mod points, but can't find the 'pollyanna' option.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
My fortune 100 company has branches, subsidiaries, and employees all over the world. We have fired VPs of a region for things like this going on in their geographic area. There are many things we don't allow anywhere globally even though they are legal or the only way to get things done in some countries.
I can't stand all of the business practice, ethics, and legal training I have to go through every year (along with 10s of thousands of other employees) at a pretty high cost to the company. But everyone from the top down to new hires knows that stuff like this won't be tolerated and that responsibility doesn't stop with the person doing the unethical behavior (so the VPs insist on everyone under them being aware of corporate policy and follow it, and you do need the push from that level).
So I know it's possible to control and have have no problem blaming "Google" as well as "Google Kenya". I don't know all the facts here, so google may very well have similar policies to my company and someone high up will be fired. But, if they haven't been making an effort to stop things like this from the corporate level, I will put some blame on them.
Google's actual corporate moto (Score:2)
Don't admit to being evil.
Re:Do no evil indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
Doesnt anyone find it really odd to hear that Google is offering to sell websites when...
A) Ive never heard of Google calling ANYONE, or even having any call centers
B) Im not aware of Google having a business selling or creating websites
C) Scammers will claim ANYTHING that will get you to sign up for something
I mean I get the whole Google is evil thing, but this just isnt Google's style, and it sounds like a classic scam. Especially when the caller starts with "Im from G-o-o-g-l-e-dot-c-o-m".
Really, none of this strikes anyone as strange and out of character?
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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.
Outright fraud (Score:4, Interesting)
Such blatant lies aren't just misbehavior, they are pure fraud. Google is trying to destroy their competitor in any way possible and in turn profit from lies. This is not a new practice to Google - they haven't been able to gain market share in social space because Facebook and Twitter got there first (of who did it well), and it's seriously injuring their currently. They are desperately trying to change that with Google+ but they know they're unable to do so because they weren't there at the right time. Google is also facing serious competition in Russia, China, South Korea and a few other countries where local search engines have the largest market share and Google is unable to compete as again, they weren't there at the right time.
Google has a long history of scraping other websites and then dropping them lower in search in favor of their own sites. They have been doing this for ages with hotels, restaurants and similar information. They're also trying to do it with flights information [mashable.com]. All of these practices will net Google enemies and most likely antitrust issues. But Google doesn't care - they know how important timing is and they will abuse their position whenever they can to get there. It's a long term goal and Google has managed to get the position where no one can really touch them even if they misbehave. Seriously, they were also found out polluting search engines with paid links [searchengineland.com]. After that they blame someone else and try to seem like a good guy. The most hilarious thing is that most geeks believe them just because they use open source (while ironically their products are all proprietary).
And note that this isn't just Google's Kenyan office misbehaving. They also received calls from Google's Indian call centers engaging in similar practices, so this is a practice accepted from Google's HQ.
On top of that, EPIC has said they will try to get antitrust investigation [techcrunch.com] into Google's introduction of Google+ into search results. People are finally starting to wake up to see how bad Google is and how it abuses other companies.
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It's important to note that, there is no hard evidence that it's google at all. It's all circumstantial.
The first IP address is not owned by Google, but the callers identified as being Google. So at this point in the game I would have thought that a scam was going on, and "Google" is just cover for the fraudster.
The second IP from india is owned by Google, and the caller identified as Google. At this point it seems that Google authorized this. But maybe that's not what really happened?
What if someone higher
Google employees (Score:2)
There are a lot Google employees that read Slashdot.
I strongly encourage those of them that are appalled at the practice to express their disgust to their direct and indirect managers, up to and including the execs [google.com].
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This wasn't just misbehaving. What Google did was outright illegal
I'm glad that we have a Kenyan lawyer on the boards to let us know this!
In all seriousness, if you're not familiar with Kenyan law, all you can say is that it is most likely (or even almost certainly) illegal, and/or most definitely would have been illegal in the USA.
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It is illegal and defined as fraud in both Kenya and USA.
Oh, I'll grant you that it's illegal in the USA. And I'm glad that you're familiar with Kenyan law. I'll grant you there isn't a much more clear cut case for fraud. However, that does not mean that Kenya works the same way as the USA.
Can you give me the specific statutes of Kenyan law that this violates?
Re:Outright fraud (Score:4, Interesting)
Looks like he sure did. To wit:
- First Post, if a subscriber wouldn't have beaten him to it
- First post with links and long, well crafted argument about how evil Google is.
- Brand new account created for pretty much this story only
- Only comments are MS is great and Google is evil.
The only person who beat him to the punch is a subscriber who can see the results early. My suspicion is that DCTech actually submitted the story.
Speaking about fraud (Score:5, Interesting)
Well ... That depends [stateofsearch.com], don't you agree ?
Apparently facebook is ("was") paying people for bad-mouthing google. I am not saying that's necessarily the case here, but it's certainly a datapoint to consider.
Re:Outright fraud (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but here's my beef: there's no rational discussion to be had with an astroturfer. It's like arguing with an ad: you can't do it. The arguments of an ad might not necessarily be wrong, but there is not rational discussion to be had.
Think about it for a second: do you really want to have Slashdot become the equivalent of the Superbowl ad segments, or the set of political ads that happen during an election year?
You might want to, but to me it's just trying to yell over noise. I have better things to do.
Legal ? (Score:3)
Re:Legal ? (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm sure the FTC would love to hear about this.
Yes, yes. The FTC certainly wants to hear about violations of US policy that occur completely overseas.
We may be the world's policeman, but we've yet to get all of our laws applied universally... (I can go to another country, commit fraud, and the US cannot charge me with any crime, and the civil courts would never hear a suit based on that action. Copyright law though, we got that covered, even if you're a British guy who has never stepped foot in the US, we'll still extradite you with no hearing from your
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This will probably be litigated in the US, as google is based there.
That's now how jurisdictions are decided. This case would be tried in KENYA, where the crime/injury took place.
Real or fake? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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To the people stating this is fake... (Score:5, Informative)
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This is no fake; and this is a huge, huge, blow to Google.
Uhm...what? I think that the only thing that could possible be a huge blow to Google would be from large-scale government. Think losing an anti-trust case or being kicked out of China.
This? This is a blip, a hiccup. They will probably stop the blatant fraud and move on, and /maybe/ apologize.
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If so, he should take it to court and let it stand.
The court of public opinion is only used by people without sufficient proof to use a real court.
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The court of public opinion is only used by people without sufficient proof to use a real court.
That's a lot of nonsense. There are other reasons, like expecting to be bludgeoned in the court of public opinion so badly that you'll fail in court if you don't fire the first shot and thus get your message out first, or expecting to suffer in a legal circus and so bringing your message into the public eye first in an attempt to forestall it.
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What "proof" does he have? He has IP logs to show two different googlebots crawled his site at different times? We have those too, for dozens of sites. It's standard practice - several bots do the crawling (I'm not sure if this is for cross validation purposes or if it simply speeds up the propogation of the result indexing across their server farms) so there's nothing intrinsically suspicious about one Google IP visiting his sites one month and a different IP at a later date. Aside from that all he has is
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I think this is a far more interesting proposition than just assuming that Google is trying to scam a Kenyan upstart out of a few hundred dollars for hosting packages. There's no reason to think that Google can't do it, but the evidence so far is pretty weak.
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How does the US have jurisdiction over this? Wouldn't Kenya be the proper venue?
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In addition he has IP logs and tracebacks to Google HQ.
Google HQ in both Nairobi, Kenya, and Hyderabad, India. Not Google HQ USA.
He has enough evidence to stand in a court of law and press charges against Google inside of the United States.
This would get thrown out due to jurisdiction issues in the first hearing. The alleged crimes all occurred in Kenya, and all alleged perpetrators/tortfeasors are in Kenya and India. It fails like nearly every standard for determining jurisdiction in the USA. (Except personal jurisdiction over Google, Inc., but the other alleged perpetrators/tortfeasors have no personal jurisdiction in the USA.)
Such is the nature of large corporate legal teams (Score:2)
Everything you said is true except the last bit, "this is a huge, huge, blow to Google." Cynically, there is no way some small Kenyan firm is going to be able to bring a serious lawsuit in the US against Google. Google's legal team would crush them, tie them up in series after series of motions, and bankrupt Mocality before any verdict could hope to be passed. Such is the nature of the US legal system.
FTFY.
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Everything you said is true except the last bit, "this is a huge, huge, blow to Google." Cynically, there is no way some small Kenyan firm is going to be able to bring a serious lawsuit in the US against Google. Google's legal team would crush them, tie them up in series after series of motions, and bankrupt Mocality before any verdict could hope to be passed. Such is the nature of large corporate legal teams.
Mocality doesn't have to bring a lawsuit against Google in the U.S, they could bring it in Kenyan court (because claiming to have a relationship with Mocality falls under 'fraudulent Business Practices'), and even then, they might not have to go to court. The bad publicity is enough to put a serious dent in Google's Africa Strategy. Also, this is spreading far beyond just Kenya (where it is a big story), it's on Techcrunch and a number of other sites.
Obviously whoever fleeced Mocality... (Score:3)
Would have no moral scruples about fleecing Google as well. I think there is 99% chance that this is either a criminal consultant, hacked servers or plain social engineering. Stefan should have purchased "website hosting" (which Google doesn't offer) and informed authorities of the resulting money trail (but it's understandable that he didn't, being a tech guy rather than a professional detective).
Localization factor (Score:2)
It's important to remember something here. This wasn't Google HQ, out in California. This was Google Kenya. Kenya ranked 154th (out of 182) in Transparency International's Corruption Index in 2011. It's not a country that is known for an ethical business climate in general; this will steep into the behaviors of any local business, regardless of who the parent company is. So while the actions of Google Kenya were reprehensible, let's not all assume that Eric Schmidt called them up personally and said, "
Yuck... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I work at Google, and generally the FUD I hear around here is just that. This sounds truly awful though.
For what it's worth, I do believe this is a Kenya office problem. Individual offices have a ton of autonomy and a call center will do what they're told. From the central office perspective, (a) they really do believe what they preach, and (b) this is just retarded. In the grand scheme of things, nobody cares about Kenyan business listings except for the top people in the Kenyan office trying to make a name for themselves.
Assuming it really is all true, I hope heads roll, and I hope Google makes amends before the courts makes amends for them.
The whole thing seems a bit off (Score:2)
30,000+ hits, but they suspect it's a group of people and not bots? That seems dubious.
The UA string is completely messed as well.
"The user agent is unusual for Kenya: the stable version of Google Chrome released on 20 September 2011, running on 32-bit Linux. With the exception of this IP, it barely appears in our logs."
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7
It seems close to safari, but also identifies itself as chrome running on Lin
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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)
Kenya Believe It? (Score:2)
Where can you find liars?
Google in Kenya!
Google in Kenya, they've got liars!
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Can we get a better source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can we get a better source? (Score:5, Funny)
How much closer to the source do you want?
I won't believe it until I get to read it in the original Klingon.
-
Re:Can we get a better source? (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, that's actually way too close to the source for my comfort.
I'm not saying they did, and I'm quite sure they did not, but Mocality could completely make up everything in this story. I'd much prefer a traditional news organization to have done the research on this so I have some third party confirmation rather than trusting the self-declared harmed party.
I believe in cloud-sourcing the news as much as the next guy, but this is when investigative reporting is most valuable. Serious accusations require serious and skilled reporting.
Re:Can we get a better source? (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is just an unmoderated discussion posted on a website. What's the problem?
Re:That is Google KENYA's responsibility. (Score:4, Insightful)
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So according to you google shouldn't make an 'evil' department, but instead they should start an 'evil' branch and all is well?
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doing exactly the same things all kenyan and indian businesses do.
"All"? How do you know? And why don't you mention that all human organizations in all nations are apt to do the same kind of thing: humans lie, cheat and steal. All humans, regardless of race, religion, nationality or party, have equal propensity to do this. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't been paying attention. Good individuals are good because of their individual choices, not the classes you choose to use to categorize them.
are you saying that google has instituted a policy for scam-calling business owners to trick them into paying them to have a domain name and a website hosted on google's servers ?
He isn't "saying" that. It is, on the evidence what Google is doing. It i
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it is not a fucking department. it is a local branch in kenya, then, some branch in india. doing exactly the same things all kenyan and indian businesses do. are you saying that google has instituted a policy for scam-calling business owners to trick them into paying them to have a domain name and a website hosted on google's servers ? does google have a hosting business ?
First, Your statement is bull. I'm Kenyan, and this is not standard operating procedure for Kenyan businesses. It behooves you to do some actual research (or even read the actual article) before spewing crap. Also, even if this was SOP, didn't your parents ask you "If all your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you do it too?". Wrong is wrong, most people know that. Germany was always the laughing stock of Europe because German businesses for the longest time could deduct bribes paid to foreign governm
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(Drops knife)
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Re:That is Google KENYA's responsibility. (Score:4, Interesting)
Engage in racist slander much? Read the article. Kenya is not so corrupt a place. I have close friends who worked for years there (in other business sectors) who confirm that.
Also, is it your view that branch offices of American corporations, if they should find themselves somewhere more corrupt than America, should join in the corruption? That's an odd view. There's specific American law against that, in fact, with strong penalties against a firm's American corporate operation if it can be proven that it enabled or condoned corrupt practices abroad. Whether American law covers the specific varieties of corruption alleged here I can't speak to. But do you really believe that there's nothing wrong with American corporations having foreign branches and subsidiaries engage in corruption?
yeah (Score:2)
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Some of the ip addresses they use are registered to google....
At the very least it is a very good impersonator.
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Is there any proof that this is actually google and not someone impersonating a google employee?
Yes.
Re: (Score:3)
according to boingboing [boingboing.net] Google will reply "soon"
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.