“The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day—without their permission.”
The above bombast was part of a much longer email written on May 3 to blogger Christopher Soghoian, who writes about security and privacy issues. The email’s author was John Mercurio, a former political reporter, who was working for a top public-relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, and it included a list of 10 other accusations against the search engine giant. The PR firm offered to pay the blogger to write an op-ed piece (even offering to “assist in the drafting, if needed”) which would then be targeted to media outlets such as The Washington Post or the Huffington Post. When the blogger asked who the PR firm’s client was, they wouldn’t say, and the blogger posted the email transcription, instead.
Last week, USA Today reported that Jim Goldman, a former CNBC tech reporter, had also contacted the publication with claims about Google on behalf of the PR firm. “After Goldman’s pitch proved largely untrue, he subsequently declined USA Today’s requests for comment,” the paper reported. They, too, were unable to unmask Burson-Marsteller’s client.
Last Friday, Newsweek blogger Dan Lyons announced on his The Daily Beast blog that, after initial denials, when faced with evidence, he had gotten the mystery client to confess. The company funding the hatchet job was none other than Facebook.
The spokesman from Facebook attempted to justify what the company had done, the blog reports, “citing two reasons: first, it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.”
Last year, Facebook altered its privacy rules overnight without notice, revealing members’ personal preferences to the public, and a security hole was discovered in many of the applications and games hosted on their site, which passed the identities and personal information of millions of people playing them to advertisers and Internet tracking companies. Google, too, has faced intense scrutiny for what some think are weak privacy practices.
