Facebook has admitted that it hired a public relations firm to introduce anti-Google stories related to user privacy. This came when the Public Relations firm Burson-Marsteller, the company hired by the social network, was caught after its attempt failed.
Blogger, Chris Soghaian, which Burson-Marsteller planned to hire, turned down the offer and exposed the plot by publishing the e-mail conversation.
Burson had been soliciting trash stories on behalf of a nameless client about Google’s service Social Circle. When the attempted slanderous campaign was revealed publicly there was a majority of rumors about who the client could be, with Apple and Microsoft in the frame.
Evidence was found that the company involved was, in fact, Facebook. When the social network was faced with the discovery, a spokesperson from Facebook confirmed it on May 11.
Facebook plotted the slanderous campaign when they thought that Google was scraping information from Facebook for their own social networking site, Social Circle. Google denies this allegation. Social Circle is being advertised as a “secondary connection” for anyone who already owns a Facebook account.
Social Circles is a feature in Google Dashboard that pulls together a user’s publicly available content from social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and adds it into the user’s search results.
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