Facebook vs. Google: Infringing on Privacy Rights
Posted by Darren Enta on Fri, May 13, 2011
Facebook recently confessed to hiring a PR firm to “raise privacy concerns” about a Google feature. That statement alone should be enough to make you say “hmmm”. Facebook has a very public reputation of debating what content they consider private and what content associated with users profile pages they are able to use in order to market that data to advertisers. Yet when emails from the company that Facebook hired began to be released to the public it was clear that objective criticisms were not what the company was asking bloggers and USA Today to print. Rather a clearly motivated point of view that Google was violating user’s privacy rights.
The feature in question was Google Social Search. When contacted to ghost write a blog investigating this feature blogger Chris Soghoian asked who was paying the PR firm, later identified as Burson-Marsteller. He wasn’t told the client when he asked but on May 11th a story published by the Daily Beast identified Facebook as the company which hired Brunson-Marsteller. The question remained, why was Facebook so concerned and why would they of all companies have wanted to raise the issue of user privacy?
An excellent piece which appeared on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2011/05/12/facebook-google-smear-campaign/) may provide some explanation. Google Social Search is intended to provide user generated content in the organic search results. So when a user searches for a restaurant they were thinking of checking out, if anyone in that users “Social Circle” has made publically available statements about your query, those will appear amongst standard Google results. Facebook, which is not the only social networking site that is used to add to a users search, claims this is “in a direct and flagrant violation of its agreement with the FTC”. This is interesting since Facebook had recently been brought in front of congress at the end of 2010 to defend its privacy policies. Facebook’s point of contention is that Google is not requiring explicit consent from users to display their content, and that they are able to acquire these results without employing Facebook’s API. It is clear that this process is not illegal and since all of the content is available publically what Facebook was attempting to call into question was how this data was aggregated and stored.
Facebook was trying to make an association between locating and storing that information and the violation of a user’s privacy. This to some observers was almost laughable since Facebook has had several public battles over its user’s privacy issues.
Facebook eventually had to come clean about being the motivating force behind this campaign and they should rethink the type of flaws of Google’s it wants to point out if they’re going to take down the competition.
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