News: Is Google Kenya Illegally Stealing Customers Through Rival’s Database?

Looks like Google Kenya is in a rough spot after allegations by Mocality – a Kenyan startup that operates the country’s biggest online business directory – accused the Mountain View company of systematically accessing its database and ‘stealing’ its customers. Stefan Magdalinski, the company’s CEO, says in a blog post that it discovered Google’s behavior after carefully monitoring internet traffic and setting up a successful sting operation to catch Google in the act.

Google hurriedly responded through The Next Web – “we’re aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission”, and that it is investigating the matter.

According to Mocality, Google called its customers and tried to get them to sign up for a competing product by lying about a partnership with Mocality that doesn’t exist. It also mentions that about 30-percent of businesses in its database have been contacted by Google Kenya employees. It seems Mocality’s evidence is pretty convincing and damning for Google especially after many such incidences, court battles, and its numerous PR troubles lately. Lets see where this goes.

We will keep you posted for further developments.