May 13, 2011 09:50 GMT  ·  By
Facebook has plenty of its own privacy issues, but it doesn't like the idea of Google accessing its data (your data)
   Facebook has plenty of its own privacy issues, but it doesn't like the idea of Google accessing its data (your data)

By now the story of Facebook trying to spread a smear campaign against Google has been blown right open. The social network hired a major PR company to spread stories about how Google is trespassing on people's privacy with a rather obscure feature in Gmail and Social Search.

The story wasn't exactly false, but it didn't really stand up to scrutiny either, which is why the journalists targeted to run it didn't bite.

Instead, the whole thing was revealed to the public, including the fact that Facebook was behind the campaign, something the company had tried to keep a secret.

Facebook and Burson-Marsteller, the PR firm, both acknowledged the sleazy move, but neither actually apologized for it, rather they were sorry that it didn't work out the way they wanted and said that 'maybe' they should have done it in a more transparent way.

The timeline of the attempted smear campaign

The whole thing started when the Daily Beast revealed that Facebook was behind the attempted smear campaign against Google that was already starting to unravel in the public.

Burson-Marsteller contacted several bloggers, privacy advocates and publications with data about an alleged Google privacy violation with Social Circle, a former feature that is now a part of Social Search.

Social Circle aims to discover what and how people are related to you online, based on publicly available information from a number of sites such as Twitter, Flickr and so on as well as data Google has internally from Reader, Gmail Contacts, Buzz and others.

You can check out Danny Sullivan's analysis of Social Circle/Social Circles and how the feature fits into this story.

However, the journalists contacted didn't really believe the feature was a privacy concern like the PR firm made it out to be. What's more, Christopher Soghoian a privacy advocate and blogger who hasn't been afraid of criticizing Google in the past, didn't believe that the story pitched to him was accurate and made public the email exchange between him and PR firm.

USAToday, which was also contacted by Burson-Marsteller, picked up on it and revealed that some unnamed client hired the PR company to try to seed the story.

Facebook and Burson-Marsteller defend their moves

When it was revealed that Facebook was behind the whole thing, everyone involved started talking.

Burson-Marsteller first defended the move saying that all it tried to do is draw attention to information was already public on a grave issue that was somehow being missed by everyone.

What's more, even though it didn't do anything wrong, it was all Facebook's fault anyway, the company says.

"Any information brought to media attention raised fair questions, was in the public domain, and was in any event for the media to verify through independent sources," the PR firm said in a statement.

"Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined," it added.

"When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle," it said.

Facebook revealed that it was behind the move, but said it was clearly not a smear campaign, rather it was just trying to bring to attention this important issue. It just didn't want anyone to known that it was behind the move.

"No ’smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles — just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose," Facebook said in its only comment on the matter.

"We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way," the social network added.

It's funny how both Facebook and Burson-Marsteller talk about "transparency" only after they've been ousted. Of course, neither company is saying that what it did was wrong or that it is sorry about it.

Facebook ends up looking petty and scared

Of course, Facebook has taken a lot of criticism over the issue and rightfully so. It's not really much of a surprise to anyone that one big company would engage in this sort of thing to attack another big company.

And perhaps it shouldn't be that surprising that Facebook took this path, it's not exactly a company known for its highly ethical behaviour.

But the sad part is that Facebook didn't have to do this, much less do it from behind the scenes. Facebook dominates social networking and is growing at a huge pace. Its valuation is closing in on $100 billion and its revenue is reported to be significant already.

All of Google's efforts in the "social web" failed miserably. The company is still working on it, but it's revealing that Facebook is so worried about what Google may be cooking that it would resort to this.

Of course, Facebook likely knows a lot more about Google's still secret plans than what's been rumored publicly, especially since there's a steady migration of employees from Google to Facebook. Maybe Facebook has reasons to be worried.

But, in the end, this is the part that will end up hurting Facebook the most, not that it attacked Google, but that it felt it needed to.

When Google attacked Bing over search results scraping, what most people talked about was why Google would take the time to attack a distant competitor unless it was genuinely threatened.

At least, Google did it in the open and brought forth its concerns over Bing on its own blog. Google's top engineers also commented on the matter on the record. Facebook tried to do it without being linked to the whole sordid deal, understandable perhaps, since the social network has plenty of privacy issues of its own that it doesn't want spotlighted.