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Facebook smear of Google backfires!

In the seemingly endless abyssal plain of user privacy invasion, moral “high ground” is very hard to find and claim.

This story reminds me of an old, non-racial American expression about “pots and kettles.”

An anti-Google campaign conducted by the Public Relations (PR) giant, Burson-Marsteller, and paid for by Facebook, spread emails last week that a Gmail feature called Social Circles has been used “to scrape and mine social sites from around the web… and share that information” without user knowledge or consent. The emails were sent to bloggers and journalists.

The war is obviously over the “social graph” of human interrelationships and interests, but I have to ask myself whether it is also over government dollars for “intelligence.” (BTW, you cannot PAY for “intelligence.” You pay for “data.” Real intelligence is genetic and sadly absent from a wide variety of business decisions. [If “business ethics” is an oxymoron, then “business intelligence” is likely one, too! :-) ] Even “renting” some of the intelligence of employees seldom taps the potential intelligence that is there. :-) ) Both Google and Facebook (along with Yahoo) have been named by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange as “… tools for the U.S. intelligence community.” Both Google and Facebook also use facial recognition technologies for submitted photos.

But I digress…. :-)

The PR campaign hit a snag when Burson-Marsteller offered assistance to influential blogger Christopher Soghoian in the drafting of an “op-ed” piece and in pitching the article to media that included the Washington Post, Politico, and the Huffington Post. When the PR firm refused to identify their client upon Soghoian’s request, Soghoian posted the email online.

Today, Dan Lyons (the author formerly known as, no, not Prince, :-) but “Fake Steve Jobs”) of The Daily Beast broke the story that the mystery client behind the Burson-Marsteller PR campaign is Facebook, after an earlier USA Today article noted that two former journalists, CNBC tech reporter Jim Goldman and former polical columnist John Mercurio were leading the Burson-Marsteller campaign.

When you are caught red-handed, the best course is often to confess, claim incompetence, :-) and hope that the public forgets quickly. The public usually obliges.

Facebook emailed to CNNMoney that “no ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended.”

For its part, Burson-Marsteller said:

“Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure andis against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined,” spokesman Paul Cordasco said.

Hopefully, they did not have to return the money. :-)

(Note added May 14, 2011: An article in WIRED and CNN takes an in-depth look at this story.)

-Bill at

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