Mocality’s Data Was ‘Publicly Available’, Says Google Spokesperson

Following the recent allegations by business listing startup, Mocality against Google that the search giant scalped its data, the company’s spokesman has issued a statement.

According to the statement made available to UK’s The Register, Google’s spokesman said:

“We’re aware that a company in Kenya has accused us of using some of their publicly available customer data without permission. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible.”

In the above statement, Google described the data as “publicly available” which suggests that since Mocality’s business listings were crowd-sourced, it can as well be described as ‘public data’, available for anyone to use.

However, according to Section 9 of Mocality’s Terms and Conditions, there are several restrictions of use of the so-called ‘public data’ which states that:

You agree that you will not:

9.4. use the Site or Service for promotional or commercial purposes, except as expressly permitted by Mocality in these Terms of Service;

9.5. use the Site or Service in a manner that may create a conflict of interest;

9.12. modify, adapt, appropriate, reproduce, distribute, translate, create derivative works or adaptations of, publicly display, sell, trade, or in any way exploit the Site or Site Content (other than Your Content), except as expressly authorised by Mocality in these Terms of Service;

9.13. reverse engineer any portion of the Site;

9.14. remove or modify any copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights notice on the Site or on any materials printed or copied off of the Site;

9.15. record, process, or mine information about other Users;

9.16. use any robot, spider, site search/retrieval application, or other automated device, process or means to access, retrieve, scrape, or index the Site or any Site Content;

9.17. access, retrieve or index the Site to construct or populate a searchable database of business listings or reviews;

While we await an official statement from Google on all the allegations, we wonder why Google didn’t seek permission from Mocality to use their data and why they had to lie about having a business relationship with Mocality.

We’ll update as soon as we have more information.