Kenya-based online firm has accused the search engine giant of systematically and unlawfully accessing its database and attempting to sell competing products to listed business owners, writes JEVANS NYABIAGE

Google, the world’s largest search engine and online advertising tech giant, has been pushed into a major public relations crisis.

Mocality, a Kenya-based online firm on Friday sensationally accused Google for systematically accessing its database and attempting to sell their competing product to their business owners.

Mocality is Kenya’s largest mobile business directory with more than 170,000 listings. The company helps promote local businesses through a crowd-sourcing programme and online search.

On Friday, Mocality on its blog, chief executive officer Stefan Magdalinski, laid out a series of unethical business practices he said Google had been carrying out against his company. The scandal has generated a buzz in Africa’s tech sphere.

This is the news that sent Google executives into panic. The US search giant apologised for the improper use of Mocality’s database and misrepresentation to potential customers.

Mocality’s database is its core business, and the company built it by paying Kenyans a fee for every business listing they submitted and was verified as accurate. Over the past two years, it has paid more than Sh11 million to individuals in Kenya as part of this crowdsourcing effort.

Last week was a rough one for Google, and it indeed ended badly.

The tech giant’s new Google+ search feature earned the fury of some people and then prompts a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Then Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was forced to defend the ‘fragmentation’ in the android market that even Google partners acknowledge is an issue.

And Friday, the firm was forced to publicly apologise for some shenanigans that the Kenyan office team is alleged to have committed against Mocality.

South African media giant Naspers owns Mocality through its Internet arm Myriad International Holdings (MIH).

In a statement published late on Friday, Google confessed that some of its employees had been acting improperly.

"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," said Nelson Mattos, vice-president for product and engineering in Europe and emerging markets.

Owning up

"We’ve already unreservedly apologised 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."

It is not yet known whether the people involved are Google employees or contractors working on the company’s behalf.

Magdalinski claimed that soon after Google launched Getting Kenyan Business Online (GKBO) in September 2011, Mocality began receiving odd calls from business owners on their database.

They were confused about Mocality’s supposed collaboration with Google.

After some investigation, Mocality discovered that Google had been accessing Mocality’s public data and using it to contact businesses to sell website development and database services from GKBO, a facet of ’s global small business assistance service.

GKBO provides Kenyan small and medium-size businesses with freely hosted and designed websites, as well as a fee-based option to purchase their own domain.

As the calls increased, Mocality’s suspicions were raised. The company began monitoring its server logs and launched a sting operation to get to the bottom of the calls.

Magdalinksi provides a variety of evidence to substantiate his claims, including IP addresses and recorded conversations between its staffers and callers representing Google, who thought they were talking to a Mocality customer.

According to Magdalinski, their investigation revealed damning results: GKBO had been accessing Mocality’s database – 30 per cent of it as of January 11, 2012 – and contacting listed business owners to sell their product to them.

Two continents

Google later outsourced the operation to India, as suggested by a Kenyan business owner from Deepthi at Google India’s offices.

Magdalinski pointed to a transcript of another call in which a Google Kenya employee phones a business owner to offer her hosting on GKBO.

The caller claims Mocality engages in bait-and-switch fraud by trying to charge business owners around Sh20,000 for listings.

"Mocality has never and will never charge for listings. The irony: on the same call, the caller tries exactly that tactic for GKBO’s hosting fees," wrote Magdalinski, on the Mocality blog.

"I did not expect to find a human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent (falsely claiming to be collaborating with us, and worse) attempt to undermine our business, being perpetrated from call centres on two continents," he added.

"If Google wanted to work with our data, why didn’t they just ask?

In discussions with various Google Kenya/Africa folks in the past, I had raised the idea of working together more closely in Kenya. Getting Kenyan businesses online is precisely what we do," Magdalinski.

It is unclear whether Mocality would be taking legal action against Google Kenya.