Fail! Facebook's smear campaign against Google backfires

Silicon Valley is abuzz over “ privacygate ,” a bungled effort by Facebook to smear Google over user privacy.

It all started when Facebook secretly hired global PR firm Burson-Marsteller to engage in a whisper campaign to claim that Google was “collecting, storing and mining millions of people’s personal information from a number of different online services and sharing it without the knowledge, consent or control of the people involved.”

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Things started to go south when John Mercurio, a former political columnist now working with the PR firm, contacted a blogger named Christopher Soghoian , an online privacy researcher who has worked with Google.

Here’s an excerpt from Mercurio’s email to Soghoian:

I wanted to gauge your interest in authoring an op-ed this week for a top-tier media outlet on an important issue that I know you’re following closely.

The topic: Google’s sweeping violations of user privacy. Google, as you know, has a well-known history of infringing on the privacy rights of America’s Internet users. Not a year has gone by since the founding of the company where it has not been the focus of front-page news detailing its zealous approach to gathering information - in many cases private and identifiable information - about online users.

…

I’m happy to help place the op-ed and assist in the drafting, if needed. For media targets, I was thinking about the Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call or the Huffington Post.

Soghoian wrote back to Mercurio to ask him whose payroll he was on, but the Burson representative declined to answer. Soghoian passed on the invitation, and instead, posted the email exchange online a few days ago.

“I get pitches on a daily basis, but it’s usually a company talking [about] how great their product, so this one made me immediately suspicious, even more so when they wouldn’t reveal who they were working for,” Soghoian told MediaBistro’s PRNewser .

This launched a whirlwind of speculation. Who was trying to take down Google? Was it Apple? Maybe Microsoft!

Downward spiral

Things continued to spiral downward when USA Today published a piece on Wednesday about Burson’s campaign to attack a little-known Gmail feature called Social Circle.

The newspaper reported that the PR firm was working on behalf of an “unknown client” to step up a “whisper campaign to get top-tier media outlets, including USA TODAY, to run news stories and editorials about how an obscure Google Gmail feature-Social Circle-ostensibly tramples the privacy of millions of Americans and violates federal fair trade rules.”

But as USA Today noted, Burson’s claims are “largely untrue.” Soghoian, for his part, told Business Insider that the the PR firm was “making a mountain out of a molehill.”

Facebook’s big bungle

It was Dan Lyons, Newsweek’s tech editor, who finally got to the bottom of things. In a piece he wrote for The Daily Beast on Thursday, Lyons revealed that the real culprit behind the bungled PR campaign was none other than Facebook.

When he confronted the social media company, Facebook came clean and told Lyon that it did what it did because it believed Google was violating user privacy and because it was nonplussed that Social Circle was scraping Facebook data.

So Facebook threw down the gauntlet. And then it backfired. Badly. Meanwhile, Social Circle went from an obscure Gmail app to one that everyone’s blogging about.

In the epic Facebook v. Google wars, looks like Google won this battle.