Facebook hired PR company to smear Google - but it all went clumsily wrong

Facebook has admitted it hired a public relations firm to target Google's privacy policies.

The social network said it had recently retained WPP Group PLC's Burson-Marsteller to pitch journalists and security experts on stories that questioned Google's practice of collecting information from some users' Facebook and other social-networking accounts.

Facebook did not disclose it was behind the campaign until a blogger published emails from Burson-Marsteller after turning down the firm's offer. Then USA Today - which considered the claims exaggerated - broke the story into the mainstream.

A Facebook spokesman told The Wall Street Journal  the company didn't authorize or intend to run a "smear" campaign. "We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way."

The story was pitched to publications including The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and popular blog Politico, according to a report on the affair by The Daily Beast (the site recently co-founded by ex-Vanity Fair/New Yorker/Talk editor Tina Brown).

By the Daily Beast's account, it was a clumsy campaign: "Here were two guys from one of the biggest PR agencies in the world, blustering around Silicon Valley like a pair of Keystone Kops."

The accusation
According to the Beast, at Google tool called Social Circle, which lets people with Gmail accounts see information not only about their friends but also about the friends of their friends, which Google calls “secondary connections.”

Burson, in its pitch to journalists, claimed Social Circle was “designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users—in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google's] agreement with the FTC.”

Also from Burson: “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.”

Google has yet to comment.