Facebook have hit the headlines this week for all the wrong reasons after it was found to be behind a smear campaign against Google and its privacy practices.
The plan backfired when an agent of the firm was caught trying to help a prominent blogger write a damming piece on one of Google's services.
The PR are firm in question was Burson-Marsteller who tried to get prominent blogger Chris Soghoian to write disparaging article about Google's questionable policy towards privacy for their Social Circle, which is a network social connections that Google uses to deliver relevant search results.
Apparently the naughty PR rep even offered to help write the article, obviously he doesn't know much about the blogging community as asking to help write a story is the easiest way to annoy any fair-minded writer.
Obviously Soghoian refused as any right-minded hack would and decided he would have the last laugh by exposing this practice, he published the emails much to Facebook's and the PR company's embarrassment.
In one email, the Burson rep directly attacks Google saying, "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." talk about the calling the pot black, wasn't Facebook who have been accused of being lax on users privacy.
The email goes on to describe Google's service as the "latest tool designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users -- in a direct and flagrant violation of its agreement with the FTC."
Soghoian like any good journalist asked to know who was paying for the campaign which the PR company refused to say, but a facebook representative has since confirmed to The Daily Beast's Dan Lyons that the company hired Burson for two reasons: "First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google's attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service."
It’s one thing to have concerns about certain company’s practices regarding privacy but to hire a PR company to try and smear the company that you have concerns about is way below the belt, and to try and influence writers and even offer to help them write the stories is stupid, highly offensive and a PR disaster of epic proportions.