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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.
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.
So is the person calling actually from Google? Or is it just some scammer claiming to be from Google?
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.
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?
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
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."
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.
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
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.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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