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Comment by peterb | Hacker News Reader

He chose his words carefully. He didn't say this was done by Google employees, but "a team of people" working on a Google project.

Google is usually straight-forward when they screw up. I'm curious to see what actually happened.

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I take this to mean that they were Google contractors, or other representative third party.

In any case, I feel like an apology is insufficient here - it sounds like what these guys have done has significantly harmed the reputation of Mocality, perhaps in an irreversible way. I'm not usually one to leap on the "payday from big company" bandwagon, but IMO Google needs to do more to make this right than simply apologizing and firing.

Maybe they will, when they know the facts from all concerned. Seems a bit premature to do anything of substance just yet.

"I take this to mean that they were Google contractors, or other representative third party."

That's what he wants you to take it to mean but that's likely not accurate. If no Google employees were involved I'd expect a quote that said so and this doesn't.

I have confidence that Google employees were not involved with the fraud aspects of what occurred here but that's not the same thing as saying that this project was 100% contractors. Indications are actually the opposite, see mocality's post* and the project's website http://www.kbo.co.ke/ ("managed by Google").

* http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...

That's a good point - if it were purely contractors, they'd probably say something like "some of our contractors were over-zealous; they are being dealt with". It's hard to come up with a plausible reason they'd protect contractors so strongly, since Google's reputation wouldn't really be under fire to the same degree as if an employee had done so / been told to do so.

> I have confidence that Google employees were not involved with the fraud aspects of what occurred here

How come, when Google India was obviously involved, looking at the post that you link as well?

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 supervision. They're also somewhat hamstrung in that in certain regional hiring situations, they have to focus on getting someone who can speak the local language over getting someone of their normal standard of ethics and acceptable background.

As a result I saw people working in Google who did evil things, pure and simple, especially in the more obscure markets to reach their sales targets. When they were caught they were fired, when they didn't and succeeded as a result, they were promoted.

This type of thing will always happen. Thinking it won't is a bit childish. It's Google's official response and subsequent actions that defines their culture.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/111590/Do-Not-Much-Evil#4128023

> they have to focus on getting someone who can speak the local language

So, for you it's just some small "regional team" when they stop calling from Kenya, after speaking local language, and then some people from Google India take over?

(*) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462983

Google deals in information. It handles information from internet content and internet users world-wide, yet it doesn't have enough internal information as to let a team go rampant like this for months.

Even if they outsourced it, I can't believe Google would just black-box the process and simply expect 'x' result from the outsource company, that's just an endorsement of shady activity.

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.

> So presumably, Kenyans have neither normal standards of ethics nor acceptable backgrounds?

I don't know if you are trying to paint him as a racist or if you really are ignorant of Kenya's crime rate

Funny, I take this to mean that they aren't quite sure what happened yet. However, they are investigating and trying to figure out what happened, and trying to get out in front of this PR-wise.

Yeah, this was posted at 10:30 MTV time, so there wasn't enough time for head office in MTV to figure out what's gone on and what to do/say about it yet.

Having known people who work in PR, if something needs explaining at 2:30 am, the flacks are making their case, not sleeping.

Perhaps this is your intent, but I thought I'd mention that the word "flack" is considered a pejorative by many PR professionals: http://www.prnewsonline.com/prnewsblog/index.php/2008/10/15/...

This comment from the link above sums it up nicely: "I think it’s all a matter of context and intention. If someone who generally respects PR professionals uses the term “flack” informally (as I myself have done in a recent blog post), then I’m fine with it. If someone else is using the term as a derogatory remark to show lack of respect for the profession, then it makes me mad."

Just thought I'd share the above for any other HN readers. Using the word "flack" is seen by many PR professionals as a sign of disrespect.

Is there a context in which it is not seen as a sign of disrespect? Perhaps when someone on HN says "flack" the disrespect is entirely intentional.

If Google were significantly unsure, it is unlikely that they would have apologized and it is unlikely that the would be preparing for "taking the appropriate action with the people involved."

In other words, if it was a simple breech of contract, the steps would be straight forward and easy to list as I suspect that actions which bring disrepute upon Google are covered in Google's standard contracts.

Except 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.

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