[LINK] Bad Google

[Kim Holburn]

Google has been caught doing some bad things just lately.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120116/22294217429/google-contractor-caught-mucking-up-competing-open-street-maps.shtml

> Google Contractor Caught Mucking Up Competing Open Street Maps
> 
> from the evil-vandalism dept
> 
> Late last week, a story broke about how a Google contractor was apparently scraping info from a Kenyan crowd-sourced phone directory, Mocality, and then calling businesses pretending that there was a joint Google-Mocality venture for which businesses had to pay. Google responded that it was "mortified" by these actions, and are investigating them. However, ReadWriteWeb, is now reporting that the very same contractor has now been called out for vandalizing Open Street Maps, the more open alternative to Google Maps that has been getting a lot more attention lately. It appears the vandalism was deliberate, doing things that are hard to spot -- like reversing the direction on one-way streets. 
> 
> Of course, Open Street Maps, like Wikipedia, is open to vandalism. That's just the nature of the game. But the fact that it was a Google contractor doing this looks especially bad, given the somewhat competitive nature of the products. As a company gets larger, there are certainly bad seeds who are going to get hired, but these two stories clearly make Google look pretty bad. It's so bad, it almost makes you wonder if that was the intention of whoever was doing it.

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/13/google-fraudulently-solicits-f.html

> The Google-Kenya ripoff
> 
> By Cory Doctorow at 3:32 am Friday, Jan 13
> 
> Mocality is an African startup that has a Kenya-wide business directory. There is no Kenyan yellow pages, so the directory was crowdsourced, paying thousands of Kenyans to help create and validate its database.
> 
> When the businesses in Mocality's database started asking them about the premium service they were offering with Google, Mocality was puzzled. They had no joint venture with Google, and they had never charged any business for inclusion in their database. When they examined their server logs, they saw a large number of hits to the records for the businesses that had been cold-called from the same IP range.
> 
> So Mocality laid a trap: when that IP range next visited the Mocality site, they fed it fake phone numbers that went to Mocality's own call center, where a Mocality operator pretended to be a business-owner and recorded the conversation. In that conversation, the caller identified himself as a Google employee, calling about a joint Google-Mocality venture, and asking the business to pay Google for a Kenya Business Online website with its own domain on that basis. This was, of course, absolutely fraudulent. There was and is no Google-Mocality joint venture.
> 
> Shortly after, that IP range stopped visiting Mocality's servers, but another range, this one registered to Google's Mountain View  headquarters [edit: this address has previously been used to conduct official Google business in India], began to query its database. Again, Mocality served a fake result with its own call-center number, and an hour later, they received a call from someone identifying herself as working on Google's behalf, asking for money for a joint Google-Mocality product.
> 
> The conclusion is hard to escape: Google -- or people working on its behalf, with its knowledge and cooperation -- took the numbers of tens of thousands of Kenyan businesses from Mocality's database, then fraudulently solicited money from them by claiming to be in a joint venture with Mocality. This seems to me to be outright criminal activity, and Google has a lot of explaining to do.


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
T: +61 2 61402408  M: +61 404072753
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