Google Caught Misbehaving By Kenyan Startup

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.

Comments

Do no evil indeed

[elrous0]

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[nahdude812]

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

[antitithenai]

Actually no, Google's Indian call centers are involved too, so this is obviously coming outside Google's Kenya's offices. On top of that, Google as the company is fully responsible for all their offices practices. You can't just point out that some other department did it.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Missing.Matter]

Note the key word "Google." When it's your name being used, you have to take the bad as well as the good. It's not "Everything good is done by Google, everything bad is done by lone employees who do not really represent Google."

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Tufriast]

The corporate offices in Google CA were traced to this issue; check his IP logs he has. I might be foggy on this, but from what I saw, this came from California as well.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Colonel Korn]

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

[Synkronos]

OrgName: Google Inc.
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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[JustinOpinion]

You're absolutely right. If the allegations are true, then Google is at fault and should be taken to task for this.

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Dunbal]

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

[El Torico]

A subordinate's excuse is, "I was just following orders."
A superior's excuse excuse is, "I was out of the loop."
Neither is acceptable.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Synkronos]

I'm not defending anything. I merely stated that the mention of Mountain View CA in the whois information is not proof of anything other than the registration being in Google CA's name, rather than what the earlier posted thought it implied.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Synkronos]

The Indian traffic comes over a Google-owned network. It's very unlikely that that was spoofed or set up, scammers don't generally go to that much trouble. It's far more likely that these are in fact Google originated actions.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[alexosaki]

I don't think that's something we should really let them get away with -- Union Carbide did that, too, arguing that they didn't have any responsibility for what happened in Bhopal because it was some subsidiary of theirs.

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."

Re:Do no evil indeed

[antitithenai]

This has been pointed out several times in the discussion. Read the article, there's other branches of Google involved too, like Google's Indian call centers. There is also lots of proof and ip addresses that lead back to Google HQ.

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

[tripleevenfall]

I wonder if the same excuse-making would apply if this had been Bing/Microsoft?

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Archimagus]

I don't think anyone is saying that Google shouldn't be held responsible. Just that it's probably not Google trying to be evil, but some random employee breaking the law. If corporate deals with it accordingly I don't see how you can condemn the company as a whole for it. If the dude making your burger at the local burger hut spits on your burger does that make the whole burger hut corporation an evil business for having their employees spit in burgers? No, it makes the guy a jerk who doesn't follow corporate policy.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is responsible for fixing the problem...that said the bad practices of a few do not indict an entire organization, unless of course directives were coming down from leadership that this is acceptable practices or Google proper doesn't respond adequately once the activities are exposed.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[nahdude812]

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[antitithenai]

Have you even read the article? It was a huge operation and on some days they manually scraped and called over 2500 businesses. No single employee can do that. And there was also other Google branches involved, like Google India.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[tripleevenfall]

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...?

Re:Do no evil indeed

[mcmonkey]

I have mod points, but can't find the 'pollyanna' option.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[stanlyb]

Translated, if something good comes from Google, first we have to understand if it is isolated to a single person, department, by accident, just bad mood, lacking internal culture, and when and only when all other reasons are excluded, we could say: THIS GOOD STUFF COMES FROM GOOGLE. With a little hint of doubt of course.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[a2wflc]

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

When (and I quote the part you left out):

"The bad press and legal repercussions would outweigh the licensing costs."

Re:Do no evil indeed

[oldhack]

It's a simple narrative - Google's got busted. WTF's got to do with Occam's Razor?

Re:Do no evil indeed

[montyzooooma]

I field calls from companies claiming to be Google at least once a week. They aren't Google, they're people wanting to intermediate between a customer and eg Adwords. It's a scam, pure and simple. Whether this is the case here I can't say for sure, but I'd be surprised if it was official Google policy.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[tripleevenfall]

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[N1AK]

No and that isn't what he said. Any organisation with tens of thousands of employees will at some point have one do something that is evil/wrong/unethical etc. The difference betweena good and a bad organisation is how they react, whether they consider it when hiring, how diligent they are in checking and how they reward and promote employees.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[pseudofrog]

With posts like this, you'll have to make a yet another new account fairly soon.

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[erroneus]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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, no other Google branches have acted this way...

Re:Do no evil indeed

[LordLimecat]

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?

Re:Do no evil indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Do no evil indeed

[ScentCone]

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 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 ... what, should your entire organization, all the way to the top of the org chart be destroyed? Really?

Re:Do no evil indeed

[geekoid]

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

[shitzu]

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[khallow]

I wonder why this was considered insightful? Microsoft hadn't had much opportunity to engage in such games 20 years ago.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[GillyGuthrie]

maggoty burgers

You just ruined McDoubles forever...

Re:Do no evil indeed

[antitithenai]

Yes, Google sells domains and sites http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/domain.html

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.

Re:Do no evil indeed

[nagnamer]

I already hate it more than msft...

Outright fraud

[antitithenai]

This wasn't just misbehaving. What Google did was outright illegal. Not only did they falsely claim that they have business partnership with Mocality, they also claimed that Mocality is engaging in bait-and-switch practices to try and charge businesses up to $200 for their listing. Mocality said they have never charged businesses and never will.

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. 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. 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 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.

Re:Outright fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

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 up the chain at Google had decided to open an office in Kenya for sales leads, but the resulting office were poorly trained, or even encouraged to cheat by any means possible (this is what came to mind when I read the transcript sections, as this is similar language that high-pressure sales that commissioned sales take.) Then, maybe for performance reasons, the Google company representative decided to use their India call center to call more businesses in a shorter period of time.

Like I doubt whoever reports to to the Google CEO was directly involved in this. If you know anything about the call center hierarchy , outsourced, even company-owned call centers don't go up the chain at all. It's usually something like...
CSR - CSR team lead - CSR Supervisor - CSR Manager - Call center Director (And this guy only runs the call center, it's only responsible for operations, not responsible for policy) The "Client" eg Google (Keyna) might be the next person up, or maybe there's a Google Africa Business development, before it ever gets to someone in the US.

But from experience, either commissions or some other metric probably caused a loss of policy adherence. If I were to blame someone, I'd blame whoever authorized the script. Somewhere along the line they were saying they associated with Mocality, instead of identifying that they found their contact information from Mocality. At that point something wasn't right.

But it's also entirely possible that Google had absolutely nothing to do with this, and rather someone had scraped the data and selling it to Google but identified as Mocality to Google.

I sure hope someone gets to the bottom of it, because it this is happening in Kenya, it may be happening everywhere.

Re:Outright fraud

[NeutronCowboy]

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.

Re:Outright fraud

[NeutronCowboy]

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.

Legal ?

[Tufriast]

Isn't this illegal in the USA? If it is a US based company can they be sued in the US for doing this? This at least crosses the slander lines, and I'm sure the FTC would love to hear about this. Any attorneys in the audience care to comment?

Re:Legal ?

[antitithenai]

Yes it is illegal in the US, and FTC should really look into Google's practices. Thankfully that is in the works, as privacy watchdog EPIC has complained to FTC and asked them to look into all of misbehaviors of Google.

Real or fake?

[happylight]

So is the person calling actually from Google? Or is it just some scammer claiming to be from Google?

Re:Real or fake?

[antitithenai]

Yes, because later there is Google Indian call centers calling and visits from Google's net ranges.

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:Real or fake?

[Synkronos]

The whois info, at least for the Indian access, has Google details, not something your regular scammer would take the time to register. Google have also launched the GKBO initiative which lends more circumstantial credence to the conclusions.

Re:Can we get a better source?

[antitithenai]

It's not just some random blog, it's the company blog. But if you want to read it from some other source, here is TechCrunch.

Re:Can we get a better source?

[Synkronos]

It's the Mocality blog, blogging about Mocality's own investigations, into things that were done to Mocality. How much closer to the source do you want?

Re:That is Google KENYA's responsibility.

[antitithenai]

So if Google creates single department that does all their evil stuff, they're still not evil company? How far will you go to defend Google and not see through their bullshit?

To the people stating this is fake...

[Tufriast]

I'd hate to pour some cold water on your hot heads - the man has proof, recorded proof. In addition he has IP logs and tracebacks to Google HQ. He has enough evidence to stand in a court of law and press charges against Google inside of the United States. He's checked with ISPs and double-checked over a period of many months. This is no fake; and this is a huge, huge, blow to Google.

Re:To the people stating this is fake...

[mkuki]

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.

Re:That is Google KENYA's responsibility.

[wytcld]

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?

revised motto:

[Thud457]

"Don't be caught being evil"

Re:Can we get a better source?

[Alsee]

How much closer to the source do you want?

I won't believe it until I get to read it in the original Klingon.

-

Obviously whoever fleeced Mocality...

[iamacat]

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).

Re:Can we get a better source?

[msauve]

"This is a rumor posted on a blog."

And this is just an unmoderated discussion posted on a website. What's the problem?

Re:Response

[rbrausse]

according to boingboing Google will reply "soon"

Ip's can be hijacked

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

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

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

[antitithenai]

Oh seriously, are we now going the route of "but someone hijacked Google's ip!". There is other evidence in the article, too, and there is absolutely no reason to believe it wasn't really Google doing it. Apart from someone having personal disbelief in Google doing evil things.

Re:Ip's can be hijacked

[hhw]

The majority of transit providers use a BGP prefix list to limit what IP addresses you are permitted to advertise to them either through manual management of the list or by using a routing registry, so it's not nearly as common as you're implying. The exception is when it comes to peering, but there aren't that many networks that do a significant amount of peering. And if any of your peers catch you IP hijacking, they're likely to de-peer pretty quickly if they discover you're hijacking IP's. Yes, there are a few transit providers who don't follow this properly (the few instances I recall of IP hijacking usually revolved around Sprint), but it's false to assume that just anyone with a BGP connection can just hijack anyone's IP address.

Re:Can we get a better source?

[MikeBabcock]

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.

Yuck...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Speaking about fraud

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Well ... That depends, 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.

The whole thing seems a bit off

[phorm]

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 Linux 64-bit...
I've checked my own UA on linux, and a buddy's Safari. The UA string is closer to Safari except that Safari doesn't run on Linux, and Safari wouldn't have the Chrome markings either. This is more than a bit unusual for a UA, it's a mismatched spoof.

My guess is that
a) Somebody has found a way to abuse google search or the search servers to perform queries
or
b) Somebody has managed to infect some devices at google. My first thought along this line would be an infected smartphone

At the moment, the only tie to google seems to be an IP address range with a messed up User Agent and somebody claiming to be a google employee (but also lying about being in partnership with mocality). That's not exactly hard data. If the phone # had been the same google office it might be a bit more (also spoofable with VOIP in about 2 seconds).

If google *was* involved in such a thing I'd gladly throw them under the bus. But I'd not be willing to do so based on the evidence given.

Re:The whole thing seems a bit off

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Came through, but not necessarily from

[vovick]

Provided Google has a worldwide VPN, which it almost certainly does, the data packets could originate from its Kenyan or Indian branch, go through VPN to Google CA, leave their private network there and come back to Kenya.

Re:Response

[Smallpond]

Yes. The Register 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.

[mkuki]

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 governments from their taxes. They would have loved your viewpoint. Anyway, with that out of the way, the blog post is pretty detailed. Google really has only 2 options 1: Explain 2: Admit culpability This is a pretty freaking big story in Kenya right now. Google is pretty well known, they've been doing a huge push to win Kenyan businesses to their services, they've invested heavily both in physical infrastructure and capacity, and this is the kind of shennanigans that can really sully a companies reputation, especially when it seems like Goliath vs David and Goliath is playing dirty.

Re:Localization factor

[Eunuchswear]

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;

Luckily for Kenya not everyone thinks like you:

I moved to Africa from the UK 30 months ago to be CEO of Mocality. When I moved, Kenya’s reputation as a corrupt place to do business made me nervous. I’ve been very happily surprised- until this point, I’ve not done business with any company here that was not completely honestly conducted. It is important for global businesses to adapt to local cultural practice, but ethics are an invariant.

Stefan Magdalinski
Nairobi, Kenya