Oh Facebook, Why Smear Google Over Privacy?

Facebook’s raison d’etre – at least in public – is to let people share their feelings with their friends and the world. Despite this, it shows a strangely dim awareness of what those feelings are.

So when it was looking for something on which to build a smear campaign against Google, there were plenty of things it could choose from, expressed on its pages and around the web. Strangely, though, it chose the subject for which it has a far more dubious track record than Google. It chose privacy.

What was Facebook thinking?

Speaking through its chosen mouthpiece, Burson Marsteller, Facebook said that a Google product 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.”

Now, shouting off about your big rival’s privacy policy is arguably a bit dumb, when you are facing sustained criticism on that same issue. Attempting to do so by clandestine secret means through a third party, when you are a company that publicly says people want to be open about everything, is just plain stupid.

Apart from anything else, the incident reveals that Facebook is more worried about Google’s moves in social media than it lets on.

The two companies are in a head-to-head battle over online advertising. Google currently owns online ads because of the historic strength of its search engine, but Facebook thinks it can take a big proportion of it, because of the current explosion of interest in social media.

The problem is that advertising in social media is a privacy minefield. Facebook can only really be effective by making dubious use of personal details which users have granted to it.

An ingrained strategy

As Richard Stallman puts it: “Abuse of power is Facebook’s business model.” Using people’s private data is so ingrained at Facebook, that “it is more likely that McDonalds would stop selling meat, than that Facebook would stop abusing privacy,” Stallman told eWEEK Europe.

Google has had its privacy run-ins, although its WiSpy gaffe was largely accidental. The backlash over poor privacy in its Buzz social media product surprised it, because it simply hadn’t considered the issue fully enough.

Facebook, on the other hand, has considered the issue, and wants to use privacy any way it can. It makes the privacy concessions it has to, in a calculated, concession to keep the punters onboard. And then it will snipe at others – concealed behind the quasi-human shield of the BM PR operatives.

But, fundamentally, Facebook simply does not get privacy- and this incident just reveals the extent of its refusal to understand.