Ouch. I hope Google makes right with Mocality.
From what I remember about this saga is that Mocality is a Kenyan business directory listing. Totally free I think. A while ago they started getting reports from companies that were listed with them that Google was cold calling the companies and trying to have them sign up for a service(for a fee). It was supposedly a joint project between Mocality and Google.
Mocality didn't know anything about this supposed partnership. They started investigating their logs and found that a range of IP's that were assigned to Google were scraping their site.
So, they setup a honeypot by listing a few companies details that they knew if it was called would indicate it was google. Sure enough soon afterwards their site was trawled again and someone from Google supposedly phoned the companies again claiming a partnership.
What was disturbing here is that this unit of Google was allowed to claim a joint partnership with a company that they had no interaction with whatsoever. I hope Mocality takes them to the cleaners for it though. Even though I love most of my google products and support them in 99% of their practices(hell i even use their location tracking services to monitor my movements), this kind of behavior should be punished.
If I was Google in this regard, finding the responsible chain of command that led to this being possible would be severely reprimanded and investigated for fraud.
Then to aid Mocality I would make sure that large scale print ads were taken out in Kenya apologizing for their behavior and assuring that there is no association between Mocality and Google.
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/13/google-fraudulently-solicits-f.html
