So, early this morning, BoingBoing.net with some pretty serious accusations towards Google’s falling ethics and a specific bit of fraud that seems to be going on in Kenya. Basically, Kenya does not have a good public business directory. There are no yellow pages and most businesses do not have a web presence. So, a company called Mocality decided they were going to do that.
What they did was provide a reward system to any Kenyan with a mobile phone who can contribute businesses to the database. Over the past two years they’ve created a database with over 170,000 businesses. Lots of these companies had zero internet presence and almost no way to reach customers outside of their respective cities. They claim to have brought about 100,000 businesses to the internet.
Fast forward to September 2011, Google launched a program called Getting Kenyan Businesses Online. Basically, Google is trying to do exactly what Mocality has already done, but, make money off the local businesses by selling them webpages and their own competing business database project. Now, competition is kind of how business works, so that should be a big deal right?
According to Mocality’s blog Google’s GKBO has been accessing Mocality’s database listing and contacting the businesses selling their products and claiming to have a relationship with Mocality. As of Wednesday 30% of the 170,000 businesses in Mocality’s database appears to have been contacted with an offer to buy products from Google like websites, domain names, or advertising.
Mocality has no partnership or corporate relationship with Google. They also do not charge businesses to have their information as a part of their database. Mocality’s owner and CEO has tracked the fraudulent offers back to what appears to be a Google owned call center in India. Google hasn’t issued a statement yet, and it’s still probably con artists using Google’s Mountain View and reputation to scam small businesses but if so, they’re fucking good at what they do.
UPDATE: Nelson Mattos, Google’s VP and for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging markets responded to Doctorow’s article:
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. We’ve already unreservedly apologized 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.
Cory Doctorow’s Article @ boingboing.
Mocality’s Blog Post.
