With privacy a hot-button topic for the past few weeks, thanks to revelations about location tracking via smartphone and the like, the timing of what has now been revealed as a Facebook smear campaign against Google must have seemed perfect. But the campaign gets a big fat “F” for execution.
The Daily Beast reports that Facebook has admitted to hiring PR firm Burson-Marsteller to push the media to write about privacy issues surrounding a Google tool called Social Circle, which allows Gmail users to see their social connections as well as those of their contacts. A Facebook spokesman told the Daily Beast that the company is concerned with the privacy implications of Google’s scraping of what a Google spokesman told USA Today is information that’s public — data gathered from Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp and more. The PR campaign began to unravel when a blogger refused to cooperate because Burson wouldn’t name its client; the blogger instead published the email exchange with John Mercurio, a former reporter now working for Burson.
There’s no question this is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. Facebook, like Google, has many privacy issues itself. Facebook could point to Buzz, and Google could raise it a Beacon — the former was Google’s bungled social-feature launch, the latter Facebook’s bungled ad-system launch. Google may have had to answer questions before a Congressional panel in Washington this week about how Android phones are tracking user locations (the better to serve you with, my dear), but Facebook is no stranger to Capitol Hill. Facebook apps were found last year to have shared user information with third parties. And a couple of lawmakers have reportedly given Facebook till June 2 to respond to their questions about Symantec’s report this week that said Facebook user data was accidentally being leaked to advertisers and others — something Facebook says it has fixed.
That Facebook would attack Google in this sneaky way might be a bit surprising — it’s like Watergate without all the breaking in and tape recorders — and besides, does the world’s largest social network really feel threatened by Google’s social-networking attempts? (This campaign also speaks volumes about tech companies’ attitude toward media manipulation.) But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s feelings about Google and privacy are no secret. In “The Facebook Effect,” the 2010 David Kirkpatrick’s book, Zuckerberg contrasts his company with Google, saying Facebook gives users more control because they’re the ones who choose to share their information: “On the one hand you have Google, which primarily gets information by tracking stuff that’s going on. They call it crawling. … On the other hand, we started the company saying there should be another way.”
Still, no matter how much egg Facebook has on its face over this episode, it will be interesting to see how Google responds to yet more privacy questions about its products. We have an email out to Google, asking whether the company plans to explain Social Circle in light of all the buzz. And of course, join us next time for another round of Silicon Valley Smackdown, because there’s sure to be more to come out of this growing and increasingly nasty war between Google and Facebook.
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