Facebook denies Google 'smear' bid

The intense rivalry between Facebook and Google went public as characters behind the Silicon Valley drama evoked chatter of smear campaigns, secrecy and even Richard Nixon.

In a twist seemingly out of a Hollywood thriller, Facebook hired a prominent public relations firm to try to plant stories harshly criticizing Google’s privacy practices in leading news outlets.

But the efforts backfired when the firm approached a blogger who not only declined the assignment, but also exposed the exchange.

Rather than getting news outlets to circulate stories about privacy problems facing Google, Facebook found itself having to answer questions about why it wanted to maintain secrecy.

Facebook said it never authorised or intended to run any smear campaign against Google. Rather, the company said it hired Burson-Marsteller to prompt investigations into how a new Google service called Social Circle collects and uses data about people. In a statement, Facebook said it should have made it clear that it was behind the efforts.

Burson-Marsteller said Facebook had requested that its identity remain secret “on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light”. The firm said that violated its own policies, “and the assignment on those terms should have been declined”.

Facebook’s efforts to stay anonymous – something that violates the terms of service for users of its site – began to unravel when Burson-Marsteller contacted blogger Christopher Soghoian, an Indiana University graduate student well known in online privacy and security circles.

The firm’s John Mercurio asked Mr Soghoian if he wanted to write an item for “a top-tier media outlet” blasting Google for what Mr Mercurio calls a “sweeping violation of user privacy”. Mr Soghoian asked for the identity of the firm’s client, but Mercurio would not reveal it. Mr Soghoian then posted the email exchange online.

Burson-Marsteller, meanwhile, also pitched USA Today. But instead of running with the planted story, USA Today published an article on the “PR firm’s attack of Gmail privacy”.

It took Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons to work out that Burson-Marsteller’s mystery client was not Apple or Microsoft, as some murmurs went, but Facebook.

Mr Lyons, incidentally, is the writer behind 'The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs', a sharp-witted blog pretending to be written by Apple’s chief executive. Mr Lyons used to go by Fake Steve Jobs, but The New York Times outed him in 2007. The blog is on hiatus out of respect for Mr Jobs, who is on medical leave.

“The mess, seemingly worthy of a Nixon re-election campaign, is embarrassing for Facebook, which has struggled at times to brand itself as trustworthy. But even more so for Burson-Marsteller, a huge PR firm that has represented lots of blue-chip corporate clients in its 58-year history,” Mr Lyons wrote in the Daily Beast, a website owned by the same company as Newsweek.

The saga has given people a rare glimpse inside Facebook’s thorny relationship with Google in a story that seems more befitting to behind-the-scenes Washington politics or rival pizza chains than the sparring between two seemingly friendly tech giants.

It was also a good lesson on privacy in an age in which few things stay out of the public eye.

“Odds are that if you are writing about something controversial, or doing something controversial, someone is going to leak it.” said said Larry Smith, president of the Institute for Crisis Management, a public relations company.

Google and Facebook are Silicon Valley neighbours with similar scrappy roots as start-ups.

Over the past few years, however, they have grown more competitive. Google is dominant in advertising that accompanies search results, but Facebook has the potential to draw advertising cash with its extensive knowledge of people’s interests and social circles. With little success, Google has urged Facebook to make its data more accessible to its search engine.

Facebook has also successfully lured scores of Google’s engineers and executives, a key reason Google gave its staff a 10% pay rise this year.

The PR fiasco was prompted by Google’s Social Circle, which is part of the company’s efforts to supplement search results with content from your Facebook, Twitter and other online connections.

Facebook, no stranger to privacy mishaps, criticises Google for collecting and storing internet users’ information without their knowledge or consent.

But even the most ardent privacy advocates are dubious that Google is doing anything all that bad with Social Circle.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said there were far more pressing privacy issues, including Google’s mapping service with street-level photography and Facebook’s tendency to encourage people to share more than they think they are sharing.

Facebook acknowledged that it could have handled the matter better.

“The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way,” the company said.

Google did not respond to messages for comment, nor did Mr Mercurio and Jim Goldman, the Burson-Marsteller employees behind the Facebook campaign. Blogger Mr Soghoian confirmed the email exchange and said: “I don’t write things for other people.”

Mr Lyons would not disclose how he determined the identity of Burson-Marsteller’s mystery client.