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BY BOB HOLT
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Facebook has confirmed that it hired public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to try to plant stories criticizing Google’s privacy practices with Social Circle in high level media outlets.
CBS News reports that the campaign failed when Facebook approached a blogger who declined the offer and then decided to go public with it.
There were no immediate signs of an apology from Facebook, and Burson-Marsteller’s seemed to be taking most of the heat. Wired.com reports the PR firm was found deleting important posts from its Facebook page on Friday.
In explaining their stance, according to Tech Crunch, Facebook said in a statement, “No ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. We 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.
Facebook says it should have made it clear that it was behind the investigation of Google’s new service, Social Circle. The PR firm said Facebook had requested secrecy about its identity because it was only trying to disclose information about Social Circle that should have been made public, and admits they should have declined the assignment immediately.Dan Lyons of the Daily Beast discovered that Burson-Marsteller's mystery client was Facebook. The Daily Beast reported that Social Circle allows users with Gmail accounts to see information about their friends, and the friends of their friends. The public relations company said in its stories that Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build personal files on millions of users—in violation of Google's agreement with the FTC.”
