>"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."
Dear Google,
Last I checked, you have been in the business of finding other people's digital information on the web, aggregating it, and offering it up as your product for more than a decade. For the past several years, your business model has increasingly relied upon encouraging web users to add more content to the web - Google+ upon which this post appears being but the latest example.
If Mocality is correct in its claim that Google did not approach them about using their data, then it is hard to see how what has happened could be a surprise. Such naivety about the way the web works is simply not credible.
The persons responsible for this are not in Africa or India. They are the people responsible for oversight; they in the executive offices at the Googleplex - and I suspect that most of the regret is that this time you were caught in the honeypot.
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 is that just a useful motto when you're the young underdog.
The problem runs deeper. Google hired a lot of creeps during their huge hiring sprees in the mid/late 2000s. Don't forget that Google has been the #1 job choice for MBA grads since around 2006. Their semi autistic hiring process gets people with high IQs but does nothing to weed out amoral weirdos or even just plain assholes. One reason I have never responded to their recruitment efforts is that every psycho I've worked with over the past decade is now a manager at Google.
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.
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
"Last I checked, you have been in the business of finding other people's digital information on the web, aggregating it, and offering it up as your product for more than a decade."
I believe there is an important difference between indexing Mocality's content and the things that Mocality is upset about. I believe is is reasonable to expect Google not to call your customers and pretend to represent a join venture, lie about your offering to them, and to pressure them into buying something.
<joke>For one thing, that doesn't sound like a very scalable crime model.</joke>
Dear Google,
Last I checked, you have been in the business of finding other people's digital information on the web, aggregating it, and offering it up as your product for more than a decade. For the past several years, your business model has increasingly relied upon encouraging web users to add more content to the web - Google+ upon which this post appears being but the latest example.
If Mocality is correct in its claim that Google did not approach them about using their data, then it is hard to see how what has happened could be a surprise. Such naivety about the way the web works is simply not credible.
The persons responsible for this are not in Africa or India. They are the people responsible for oversight; they in the executive offices at the Googleplex - and I suspect that most of the regret is that this time you were caught in the honeypot.