Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google responds to the Mocality blog post

plus.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 137 posts

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#121

Post by DanBC »

ZeroMinx wrote: post #40
pork wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a bit disingenuous to equate some Google employees from doing this with Google as a company doing it. Um...no, it's not disingenuous at all .

Um...yes, it is. Take any 10k+ employee company, can you as a company guarantee that no employer will "do no evil"? That's impossible. I'm not trying to defend Google here, but just saying that an act made by an employee at a company is equal to a given strategy by the same company is just ludicrous.

There's some slight differences between "Google as a company is responsible for the actions, even the unknown unsanctioned actions, of their employees" and "Google is responsible, and they did it deliberately."

The former is recognised in some laws in some jurisdictions (off the top of my head: In England a company director is responsible for the piracy of their employees during company time, even if the director doesn't know about it and didn't ask for it.)

In my opinion it's fine to say that Google is responsible, even if they didn't know about it. Maybe they need to start improving their governance procedures, especially in cultures where bribery and corruption are rampant. "Don't be evil" should include "don't be evil, even if evil is usual in the region we're working in".

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#122

Post by brudgers »

Tichy wrote: post #56
acqq wrote: post #43

So Nelson Mattos ( http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/per... ) confirms that what Mocality diagnosed is correct: - there are people inside of Google, working for Google, that manually accessed web data of Mocality and then phoned Mocality clients making fraudulent claims about Mocality and practically trying to extort the money from the clients. Note that those in Google can't be "just some loca…

Is it? At the most some team inside went rampant and will probably be fired. Aren't there bound to be some black sheep in any organization with 1000s of members? The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous.

>"The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous."

Google's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize profits. Running an eight person call center with wages competitive for the local market in Kenya is pretty cheap - but apparently not cheap enough, thus the operation was moved to India.

This wasn't rouge warriors led by one bad supervisor - the level of authority was sufficient to move operational production from the local manager to another continent. People up the food chain looked at what was happening and decided to scale it.

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#123

Post by [deleted] »

TallTalesOrTrue wrote: post #117
ori_b wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Are you sure that people working at Google didn't just do something for their own profit?

The guy talking to businesses wasn't talking on his own behalf. He was representing Google and acting on Google's behalf. It's stupid to suggest that he was doing this for his own profit.

[deleted]

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#124

Post by notahacker »

brudgers wrote: post #122
Tichy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? At the most some team inside went rampant and will probably be fired. Aren't there bound to be some black sheep in any organization with 1000s of members? The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous.

> "The notion that Google needs to scam some African directory service for profit just seems ridiculous." Google's management has a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to maximize profits. Running an eight person call center with wages competitive for the local market in Kenya is pretty cheap - but apparently not cheap enough, thus the operation was moved to India. This wasn't rouge warriors led by one bad s…

How much authority does a junior manager need to outsource telesales to India? And how many people have oversight over the suggested telephone scripts?

Possibly Googler's could shed some light on internal processes for things like that but my guess would be (i)not much if a business case for "engaging with Kenyan businesses" has already been agreed on by regional managers and (ii) one or two

I wouldn't expect the people that had oversight over the telephone scripts to still have a job by the end of next week, mind you.

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#125

Post by WettowelReactor »

VMG wrote: post #51
y0ghur7_xxx wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scam was going on for months. It's not something that some employee did without telling anyone, hidden away in some office. You can't possibly contact all those businesses during work hours at google without some boss asking you what you are working on and what you are doing. And if that is possible inside google, imho something is very wrong.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone significant knew about this at Google. Do you really think that they are in such dire straits that they have to scam Africans for profit?

I would be curious what your thoughts are on Murdoch and the News of the World scandal. In that case everyone seems to think that Murdoch new or should have known yet in this case Google execs get a pass?

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#126

Post by nl »

AznHisoka wrote: post #20
kenjackson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope Google isn't that tone deaf. Jobs got a lot right, and one of them is at the VP-level you don't have excuses. The janitor can have excuses, but if this is under your watch -- it's under your watch. I felt like Google played dumb with the drug ads thing and didn't really hold people accountable (Page was hardly rebuked) -- here they need to come down hard to show that they're serious about "Don't be evil" -- or…

Not sure why people ever believed that Don't be evil propaganda. You can hand out all those cute Google t-shirts, pens, give free lunches, give free massages, give mom's good maternity, etc.. doesn't really matter.. You're a business and a public one at that... that means you'll do anything for profit, just like every other company.

That's not true.

Google's two-tier share structure specifically means they do not need to act in anyway that Page and Brin don't want to.

Even if every other shareholder hated everything they did, Page & Brin's shares will always out-vote them because each share they own is worth 10 votes of anyone else.[1]

[1] "The actual voting power of the insiders is much higher, however, as Google has a dual class stock structure in which each Class B share gets ten votes compared to each Class A share getting one." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#127

Post by WettowelReactor »

jnbiche wrote: post #47
leak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as legal action, Google employees violated Mocality 's Terms & Condition so maybe legal action is possible.

And they (or whoever was making those phone calls) fraudulently misrepresented themselves, thereby committing fraud by the laws of the US. Not sure about Kenyan laws.

If so this is exactly the kind of thing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was invented for.

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#128

Post by michaelcampbell »

derefr wrote: post #88
tripzilch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following the same reasoning we shouldn't laud Google for all the great stuff they did either, like GMail, Search, etc. Sorry it's one or the other. I know I like to say, we're IT and if anything goes wrong it's not our fault, but if anything goes extremely well, we'll take the credit--but then I know I'm being facetious :)

> Following the same reasoning we shouldn't laud Google for all the great stuff they did either, like GMail, Search, etc. You know, why not think of Google (or Microsoft, or any other Zaibatsu-pretending-to-be-one-brand) as companies resident within a start-up incubator? Treating Google's Adsense team as the same "culture" as Google's Search team makes about as much sense as treating Sony Pictures as being the same c…

Google has mentioned a lot of times that various projects started from 20% projects of specific people. The post you're replying to was so ridiculous it wasn't bearing me responding.

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#129

Post by jamii »

okal wrote: post #107
Steko wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a hard time coming to grips with the idea of a billionaire company committing outright fraud for ten dollar domain names. The fraudsters may well have been Google employees and/or contractors. I think Willful at metafilter put it best [1]: I worked at Google for a few years. My experience is that it's like any other huge multinational corporation in that there are regional teams that get more or less super…

So presumably, Kenyans have neither normal standards of ethics nor acceptable backgrounds? Like most other posters speaking in favour of Google, Willful displays an arrogance I can't quite understand. I'd be really curious about what you'd have to say if this was some American (or other "acceptable background") startup.

If you were feeling generous you could interpret it as saying that 'is competent & is ethical & speaks english' is necessarily a bigger hiring pool than 'is competent & is ethical & speaks english & speaks the local language'. The identity of 'local language' is irrelevant, trying to find bilingual candidates always narrows the hiring pool.

Re: Google responds to the Mocality blog post

#130

Post by VMG »

WettowelReactor wrote: post #125
VMG wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone significant knew about this at Google. Do you really think that they are in such dire straits that they have to scam Africans for profit?

I would be curious what your thoughts are on Murdoch and the News of the World scandal. In that case everyone seems to think that Murdoch new or should have known yet in this case Google execs get a pass?

Different risk/reward ratios.

I'm much more certain that they aren't stupid than I am certain that they aren't evil.

Post reply on HN