-photo credit: Mashable article
News is out on Facebook’s latest smear campaign.
The Dirt
According to the article published on The Daily Beast, Facebook has admitted to hiring a top PR agency, Burson-Marsteller, to plant negative stories about Google. The plot backfired when an influential blogger that Burson hoped to recruit to write a “Google-bashing op ed” turned down the offer and went a step ahead to post the emails that the agency sent him. Facebook, it seems, has been using Burson to pitch anti-Google stories to the newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.
For quite some time now there has been reportedly rising tension between Google and Facebook. It all started with Google, the search engine giant, viewing Facebook as a threat and had plans to fight back by launching a social-networking system of its own. Till now, Google hasn’t implemented its system yet but Facebook has already taken measures to counter them using the Google tool called Social Search. as their counter-strategy.
Social Search lets people with Gmail accounts see information not only about their friends but also about the friends of their friends which Google labels as “secondary connection”. Burson stated that Social Search 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. 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.
Facebook’s main issue here is that some of the stuff that pops up under “secondary connections” in Google’s Social Circle is content pulled from Facebook. In other words, Google aims to build a social-networking business by using that “rich user data” that Facebook has gathered.
According to the article, Facebook claims that Google is violating Facebook’s terms of service when it uses Facebook’s member data in that way. As quoted from a Facebook spokesperson,
We are concerned that Google may be improperly using data they have scraped about Facebook users.
Facebook’s Defense
The spokesperson added that Facebook
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 — just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose.
and they 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.
Maybe Facebook Has A Point?
According to a Mashable article, Facebook does raise some valid concerns about Google’s social search product.
Social search, which was launched in October 2009, provides search results with data aggregated from your social graph. Search for a particular restaurant, for instance, and social search might pull up a tweet from someone you follow noting that she ate there recently and didn’t enjoy the food.
To display this information, Google requires an indexable understanding of your social graph, which Google calls “social connections.” The company builds social connections for users by gathering information about your Google contacts and chat buddies, from information and accounts connected to your Google Profile, and through secondary connections.
Google Profiles generally provide most of this information, as many Google users have set up a Google Profile that links to their accounts on social services such as Flickr, Twitter, Blogger and Quora, just as they might also have done on a service like About.me. Although Google doesn’t allow users to connect their Facebook accounts to their Google Profiles, users can still enter a link to the URL of their public Facebook Pages or private profiles, which Google can scrape to display information such as status updates and photos that a user has authorized to display publicly.
The problem that Facebook is pointing out is that even if a user doesn’t explicitly link their Facebook account on their Google Profile, Google can still display his or her public Facebook information.
The way that Google does this is clever, legal and a little unnerving.
Google is able to crawl accounts to surface secondary social connections. If you put up a link of your personal website to your Google profile, information displayed on that website might unwittingly appear in the social search results of someone who follows you on Twitter.
Similarly, Google can index your public Facebook status updates even if you don’t directly post a link to your Facebook account on your Google Profile. If, for instance, you posted a link to your Quora account, which you signed up with using your Facebook credentials, Google could go ahead and pull in all of your public Facebook statups updates as well.
This is, to be clear, in no way illegal. Google isn’t surfacing any information that isn’t in some way public. Users could conceivably use their own skills to find these links manually, but Google has just automated the process. The problem is that users aren’t being properly informed about how Google is making their social data public. Publicly available information and information that can be surfaced at a moment’s notice by someone you know are two different things.
It is indeed unnerving to realize how much information Google can extract from our personal lives through accounts linked together indirectly. Knowing that anyone can look through my various social connections and networks associated with my name from my personal email address is shocking.
Does Facebook Really Care About Our Privacy?
I have dedicated a blog post to privacy questions that Facebook raises. So maybe Facebook isn’t that concerned after all.
Also, if Facebook encourages users to lock down their accounts, they could limit the usefulness of Google’s data-mining efforts. The article states that maybe
Facebook is annoyed that Google has figured out how to use its data without employing its API, so preventing Facebook from controlling how users’ data can be used. Google is selling ads against data that it is pulling from Facebook, putting it directly with Facebook’s own ad network.
All in all, this is a highly interesting case. Or maybe it is just another one of those scenarios of the pot calling the kettle black.
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