Facebook has admitted it authorized an effort to raise privacy concerns about a Google product, but says it was not intended as a smear campaign.
The social networking giant released a statement acknowledging that it hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to alert the media about the questionable use of Facebook user information in a little-known Google feature called Google Social Search.
The feature pulls in publicly available data about users from social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, and displays it in the search results of your social connections — often without their direct authorization.
Unsavory emails sent to reporters have since surfaced, deeply embarrassing both Facebook and Burson-Marsteller.
“Google, as you know, has a well-known history of infringing on the privacy rights of America’s Internet users,” a representative wrote in an email to one targeted blogger, Chris Soghoian. “[This] latest tool designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users –- in a direct and flagrant violation of its agreement with the FTC.”
Embarrassment escalated after USA Today and then The Daily Beast published stories about the agency’s antics.
While Facebook refuses to say that it took part in a “smear campaign,” the company admits that it “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,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Mashable.
“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.”
Burson-Marsteller has been quick to do a little crisis management of its own, telling Cnet in an emailed statement that an anonymous smear campaign “was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined… 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.”
