I am not sure why he even needs two paragraphs before coming to the point: Google was basically phishing by pretending that they were partnered with Mocality.
Isn't that what a phishing scam is? I lie and tell hotmail customers, for example, that I am from hotmail or somehow partnered with hotmail and that I need your password(or credit card). That's almost criminal.
> Google was basically phishing by pretending that they were partnered with Mocality.
It's a bit disingenuous to equate some Google employees from doing this with Google as a company doing it. I could be very wrong here (and would be extraordinarily disappointed in the company if so), but I doubt this was a corporate-sanctioned activity.
When an engineer at google comes up with a great idea during work hours not sanctioned by google, google still owns that idea and its success. Not the individual.
This is an important point. I am reading a lot of defence on here for google and there is little to back it up. This isn't a minor oversight executed by a small team, rather the precise opposite.
I would say Google's reply has been a lie(dare I say "utter bullshit") - an idea like this doesn't accidentally become implemented. It wasn't even implemented in a small way, both being executed from inside google and google finding it worthwhile to pay a separate company to expand the program for them. (A company doing exactly what google has asked of them, to the point of google having to approve the scripts used by callers.)
This is incredibly bad of them, and while "HQ" might not have fully understood the methods being used they wouldn't have not known nothing about it. It's about on par with News Corp executives pretending they didn't know about voicemail-hacking.
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 company as Sony Computer Entertainment, or Virgin Airlines as being the same company as Virgin Mobile.
So, don't say "Google did this to GMail today" or "Google's search is amazing" or "Google merged their Page Creator into Google Sites"; instead, say "The GMail team launched this today" or "I love the Google Search folks" or "Google Page Creator got bought out by Google Sites."
If YCombinator funded/supported say a company that allowed your house to get trashed with no reparations or attempt to make good, then yes I'd hold that against YCombinator. Ultimately Google Inc. is where the money funnels to & is ultimately responsible for it's subcultures.
This idea that Google can't be held responsible for bad employee behavior is borderline religious. Praise Google when it does something good, let Google off the hook when it does something bad.
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.
Nonsense. You can't draw an equals sign between two actions just because they sounds similar. One is a completely legal action by an employee in good standing. The other is a crime. They are not the same thing and should not be treated as such.
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.
Have you looked at the transcript of his conversation? Would he be using an '@gmail.com' address instead of an '@google.com' address if he was doing it on Google's behalf?
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.
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?
It went on for months, even if they outsourced a team that just happened to interpret its orders "creatively", having such a scam operate under your watch, while you're paying them, is--to put it mildy--quite the oversight.
You clearly have never worked with an outsourced team. Shit like this can happen with the utmost of ease - unless Google has an internal time constantly involved in the actual area of the outsourced team.
Months is an incredibly short period of time for a large organization. Especially when considering a small, probably low priority group. A large organization isn't like a startup, for a small low priority group the feedback loop isn't daily, its at best weekly and quite possibly longer even monthly (and gets longer as you go up the corporate ladder). What you may identify about a groups activities in a couple weeks at a small company can easily take months in a large company.
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?
> It's not something that some employee did without telling anyone, hidden away in some office.
Awesome; since you seem to have more facts than anyone else in this emotion-laden thread, please lay them out for us. Perhaps you're right; I simply don't know, but since you seem to have evidence of this, I'm sure Google legal would love to see it.
I don't. I just repeated what Nelson Mattos wrote on his blog.
"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."
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".
No, it is not a valid point. A company must take responsibility for its employees or contractors. It hired them. It is responsible for them. It must be held accountable for them. Why? Because a company is its employees. And yes, a few rotten apples will spoil the party. You judge a company by its worst employees, not its best. That's the way you judge any group. That's why a group worth admiring has the highest standard for membership and mercilessly purges its ranks of bad apples.
No one is saying Google should not take responsibility - they should, and appear to be. Continue being angry at Google as a whole about this incident if they try to sweep it under the rug and do not get rid of those responsible.
I'll also continue being angry until they come up with a better response than a half-assed paragraph on a social network by some guy that doesn't even bother introducing himself or his function within Google.
Isn't that what a phishing scam is? I lie and tell hotmail customers, for example, that I am from hotmail or somehow partnered with hotmail and that I need your password(or credit card). That's almost criminal.