Very few news outlets / blogs took the bait, but yesterday Gawker bit the story from Business Insider which in turn was gullible enough to eat up the story from this PR firm.
The story seemed odd enough: Google's Gmail was spying on your contacts trolling for external data for social media relationships. Of course, it was a bit of a stretch that Gmail was somehow violating privacy issues -- after all, anyone with Gmail knows that it will ask you if you want to connect with different people on your contact list. Not exactly big news, or new news, or news.
Talk about egg on face. Turns out Facebook had hired a PR firm to try to manufacture a story with excessive claims on what was going on, and was caught by Dan Lyons at The Daily Beast.
Not only was this PR firm trying to place a fake story with mainstream journalists, but it was pushing them to use this as a headline: "LESS THAN ONE MONTH AFTER FTC PRIVACY VIOLATION SETTLEMENT, GOOGLE QUIETLY LAUNCHES SWEEPING VIOLATION OF USER PRIVACY."*
It also alleges that, "Google Social Circles does not ask “permission” from individuals who will have their profiles, connections and other personal data shared in the new network."*
None of it was true, however. Gmail asks if you want to connect to your contacts into your Social Circle. And as a matter of fact, it only finds information that is publicly available on the internet. If you close your social media off, it won't be found.
Looks like the PR firm is going to need its own PR firm...and maybe legal representation.
* - see this email dump.
UPDATE 5/12/11 12:35 PDT: Well that was fast: the PR firm quit their relationship with Facebook, suggesting that it was against their own policy to try to keep their client a secret, and Facebook is backpedaling on its reasoning for its actions.
No comments:
Post a Comment