Google Admits to Accessing Kenyan Rival's Customer Database Dishonestly, Lying About Relationship
Tiffany Kaiser - January 14, 2012 1:30 PM
Google has apologized, and is looking into how this blunder occurred
This new year has been particularly challenging for Google so far, with the Google Chrome sponsored blog posts fiasco and the launch of its latest social search feature "Search Plus Your World," which has caught some heated attention from Twitter and could quite possibly attract the Justice Department. Now, Google has added a huge cherry on top of this epic 2012 failure sundae.
Google was recently caught accessing the customer database of listings firm Mocality, which is a rival company in Kenya, Africa, without permission. To top it off, Google was lying to those in the customer database about its relationship with Mocality in order to steal business.
Google had launched a program called "Get Your Business Online," which featured "Getting Kenyan Businesses Online" for the country. The initiative was meant to help small businesses around the world build a website online. It offers a free website, free domain, free AdWords credit and marketing help for a year, then there's a fee after that. Mocality, on the other hand, offers to list about 170,000 Kenyan businesses.
The lid was blown off of Google's shady operation when Mocality began receiving calls from its customers asking questions about setting up their website. Mocality was obviously confused, as it had never offered such a service.
To check its suspicions, Mocality set up a trap where it changed some of the telephone numbers on its business directory to the telephone number of its own call centers. The Kenyan listings firm ended up recording calls from Google employees, who offered to build a website for the businesses and also falsely claimed that the search giant had a business relationship with Mocality. Google even lied in one instance saying that Mocality would charge to list that particular business.
Mocality then posted about its discovery in its blog on Friday, putting Google under the spotlight of the deceitful situation.
"Since October, Google appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality's database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners," said Stefan Magdalinski, chief executive of Mocality, in the blog post Friday. "They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on two continents."
Google immediately investigated Mocality's claims, and found that they were true. In response, Google's Nelson Mattos, vice president for Product and Engineering for Europe and Emerging Markets, released a statement via Google+ saying that Google is embarrassed.
"We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality's data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites," said Mattos. "We've already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We're still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we'll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved."
The statement doesn't exactly place the blame on Google, as Mattos said that "a team of people working on a Google project" were the perpetrators. This could very well indicate third party contractors, or at least Google probably hopes that's the case so it can pawn off the blame.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=23774
Tiffany Kaiser - January 14, 2012 1:30 PM
Google has apologized, and is looking into how this blunder occurred
This new year has been particularly challenging for Google so far, with the Google Chrome sponsored blog posts fiasco and the launch of its latest social search feature "Search Plus Your World," which has caught some heated attention from Twitter and could quite possibly attract the Justice Department. Now, Google has added a huge cherry on top of this epic 2012 failure sundae.
Google was recently caught accessing the customer database of listings firm Mocality, which is a rival company in Kenya, Africa, without permission. To top it off, Google was lying to those in the customer database about its relationship with Mocality in order to steal business.
Google had launched a program called "Get Your Business Online," which featured "Getting Kenyan Businesses Online" for the country. The initiative was meant to help small businesses around the world build a website online. It offers a free website, free domain, free AdWords credit and marketing help for a year, then there's a fee after that. Mocality, on the other hand, offers to list about 170,000 Kenyan businesses.
The lid was blown off of Google's shady operation when Mocality began receiving calls from its customers asking questions about setting up their website. Mocality was obviously confused, as it had never offered such a service.
To check its suspicions, Mocality set up a trap where it changed some of the telephone numbers on its business directory to the telephone number of its own call centers. The Kenyan listings firm ended up recording calls from Google employees, who offered to build a website for the businesses and also falsely claimed that the search giant had a business relationship with Mocality. Google even lied in one instance saying that Mocality would charge to list that particular business.
Mocality then posted about its discovery in its blog on Friday, putting Google under the spotlight of the deceitful situation.
"Since October, Google appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality's database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners," said Stefan Magdalinski, chief executive of Mocality, in the blog post Friday. "They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on two continents."
Google immediately investigated Mocality's claims, and found that they were true. In response, Google's Nelson Mattos, vice president for Product and Engineering for Europe and Emerging Markets, released a statement via Google+ saying that Google is embarrassed.
"We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality's data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites," said Mattos. "We've already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We're still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we'll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved."
The statement doesn't exactly place the blame on Google, as Mattos said that "a team of people working on a Google project" were the perpetrators. This could very well indicate third party contractors, or at least Google probably hopes that's the case so it can pawn off the blame.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=23774
