PR Firm’s Attempt To Plant Anti-Google Privacy Story Backfires

Almost every technology company these days is starting to take some heat over privacy issues, and Google is certainly no exception. But someone is making a concerted PR effort to pile on with yet more stories, apparently seeing privacy as a weak point for the search giant.

One of the world’s largest PR firms, Burson-Marsteller, is now under scrutiny after its failed attempt to plant an anti-Google privacy story in USA Today. The story of this failed pitch shows how politically explosive the issue of online privacy is right now, and how it’s being used by corporations as a tool to fight each other. The question that’s still unanswered, of course, is who exactly chose to fund this campaign. Two Burson-Marsteller reps pitched USA Today, as well as two prominent privacy advocates, on the idea of a story or op-ed slamming Google’s Social Search function as harboring serious privacy violations. But USA Today reporters ultimately determined that the story being fed to them by BM was “largely untrue,” and Chris Soghoian -- a privacy researcher who was pitched by BM on May 6 -- said that the feature doesn’t raise any privacy concerns. That’s noteworthy because Soghoian is certainly not the type who hesitates to criticize Google for its privacy practices. He rejected the pitch, tweeting: “I am quite capable of authoring my own anti-google stuff thank you.”