Well, hard to say seeing as how the jury's still out on exactly what happened.
If it was a rogue team in Google, there are a few things that come to mind:
- Google needs to refund all customers they acquired via this process and alert them that they were duped.
- Google needs to call every single business that the rogue team called and inform of what happened, and that Google is not affiliated with Mocality in any way whatsoever. Any fraudulent or deceptive claims that Google allegedly made against Mocality also needs to be addressed and recanted - to every single business that Google scraped and called.
A blanket apology and correction, on a site that the vast majority of these businesses will never read, is simply a cop out and wholly insufficient.
"A blanket apology and correction, on a site that the vast majority of these businesses will never read, is simply a cop out and wholly insufficient."
What about the original post gave you the impression that the blog post was the end of things? How about giving the people who are dealing with this a reasonable amount of time do handle it?
You're reading way more into my post than I intended. Like I said, the jury's still out on what precisely happened, it's doubtful Google has yet figured out just what exactly occurred.
My post was responding to jrockway, who seemed to suggest that, because employee freedom leads to innovation and Good Things(tm), that people should simply let things like this slide with an apology, and chalk it up to a price of innovation. That's a load of crap. Real, provable damages needs to be corrected where possible, and compensated where it isn't.
He also didn't seem to be able to imagine any form of remedial action more than apologizing and disciplinary action - as if the real damage caused to another business is but a detail, or something hopelessly unfixable - neither of which are true.
tl;dr: Google probably (probably) is going to make this right, especially with this much flak directed at them. If jrockway was in charge of Google, though, I wouldn't expect the same.
If it was a rogue team in Google, there are a few things that come to mind:
- Google needs to refund all customers they acquired via this process and alert them that they were duped.
- Google needs to call every single business that the rogue team called and inform of what happened, and that Google is not affiliated with Mocality in any way whatsoever. Any fraudulent or deceptive claims that Google allegedly made against Mocality also needs to be addressed and recanted - to every single business that Google scraped and called.
A blanket apology and correction, on a site that the vast majority of these businesses will never read, is simply a cop out and wholly insufficient.