Facebook is a bit embarrassed today after being uncovered as the culprit involved in a smear campaign against rival Google (GOOG).
The issue came to light after Facebook hired a well-respected public-relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, to suggest some ugly things about Google to reporters. Burson assigned two of its highest-profile employees to the job: former CNBC reporter Jim Goldman and former political reporter John Mercurio.
Two of them got to work, alerting reporters to Google's "sweeping violations of user privacy." The culprit? Google Social Circle, which builds a network of Gmail users' friends and contacts -- and their friends and contacts. Google culls public sites like Twitter and, yes, Facebook, for the information. You can read more about it here.
Mercurio sent one blogger an e-mail earlier this month offering to ghost-write a column for him about this. "Google is collecting, storing and mining millions of people’s personal information from a number of different online services and sharing it without the knowledge, consent or control of the people involved," the e-mail read. The entire e-mail chain is here.
Goldman started working on reporters at USA Today. Neither of them would disclose who was funding their work. But it wasn't long before reporters began to find glaring holes in Burson-Marsteller's claims -- and then the firm clammed up. "After Goldman's pitch proved largely untrue, he subsequently declined USA Today's requests for comment," the newspaper wrote.
Then The Daily Beast blew this whole thing out of the water by revealing that Facebook had hired Burson-Marsteller. Facebook admitted to the scheme, saying it thinks Google's actions are raising privacy concerns, and that it doesn't like having its own data scraped by Google Social Circle.
This kind of smear tactic is fairly common in the industry, but to get busted -- and in such a clunky way -- is an embarrassment for Facebook. "Yet here were two guys from one of the biggest and best-known PR agencies in the world, blustering around Silicon Valley like a pair of Keystone Kops," writes Dan Lyons of The Daily Beast.
And others piled on. "Secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google, even offering to help write those stories and then get them published elsewhere, is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly," wrote Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. "It’s also really, really dumb."
One of the bloggers that Mercurio approached is also speaking out. "Now that we know Facebook is behind this, I’m frankly shocked they would try and use me," said privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian.
And Facebook is trying to make this whole thing go away. One spokesman told Politico that "no 'smear' campaign was authorized or intended" against Google. But, he added, "the issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way."
Google, for its part, isn't saying a whole lot here, and it doesn't have to. Facebook is digging its own hole quite nicely.
The issue came to light after Facebook hired a well-respected public-relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, to suggest some ugly things about Google to reporters. Burson assigned two of its highest-profile employees to the job: former CNBC reporter Jim Goldman and former political reporter John Mercurio.
Two of them got to work, alerting reporters to Google's "sweeping violations of user privacy." The culprit? Google Social Circle, which builds a network of Gmail users' friends and contacts -- and their friends and contacts. Google culls public sites like Twitter and, yes, Facebook, for the information. You can read more about it here.
Mercurio sent one blogger an e-mail earlier this month offering to ghost-write a column for him about this. "Google is collecting, storing and mining millions of people’s personal information from a number of different online services and sharing it without the knowledge, consent or control of the people involved," the e-mail read. The entire e-mail chain is here.
Goldman started working on reporters at USA Today. Neither of them would disclose who was funding their work. But it wasn't long before reporters began to find glaring holes in Burson-Marsteller's claims -- and then the firm clammed up. "After Goldman's pitch proved largely untrue, he subsequently declined USA Today's requests for comment," the newspaper wrote.
Then The Daily Beast blew this whole thing out of the water by revealing that Facebook had hired Burson-Marsteller. Facebook admitted to the scheme, saying it thinks Google's actions are raising privacy concerns, and that it doesn't like having its own data scraped by Google Social Circle.
This kind of smear tactic is fairly common in the industry, but to get busted -- and in such a clunky way -- is an embarrassment for Facebook. "Yet here were two guys from one of the biggest and best-known PR agencies in the world, blustering around Silicon Valley like a pair of Keystone Kops," writes Dan Lyons of The Daily Beast.
And others piled on. "Secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google, even offering to help write those stories and then get them published elsewhere, is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly," wrote Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. "It’s also really, really dumb."
One of the bloggers that Mercurio approached is also speaking out. "Now that we know Facebook is behind this, I’m frankly shocked they would try and use me," said privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian.
And Facebook is trying to make this whole thing go away. One spokesman told Politico that "no 'smear' campaign was authorized or intended" against Google. But, he added, "the issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way."
Google, for its part, isn't saying a whole lot here, and it doesn't have to. Facebook is digging its own hole quite nicely.
MARKET UPDATE
[BRIEFING.COM] Concerted selling sent stocks down sharply to their lowest level in a month this session. The effort came amid renewed concern about global economic growth, the fiscal condition of countries in the eurozone periphery and, as a corollary, a stronger dollar. ... More
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