Facebook is in a bit of a bind this week, after its PR-by-blogger attack on Google was leaked to the public. In a nutshell, Facebook was paying a PR firm to very quietly pitch stories about how awful Google’s privacy is to bloggers and reporters. Journalists being journalists, the did some investigation into the PR firm and found that Facebook was behind the anti-Google stories.
The story Facebook was pushing was about how Google’s social reach was growing, and the privacy issues that creates. Basically, Facebook was trying to get Google in trouble for doing, more or less, what Facebook does.
It’s no secret that Facebook and Google don’t like each other much. But the reason Facebook engaged in this campaign appears to be how much people trust Google and how much they don’t trust Facebook.
We took a look across the Chitika network at privacy-related searches for Facebook and Google, and found that people were about ten times more concerned about Facebook privacy than Google. This has to make Facebook at least annoyed, if not angry. The two companies duking it out for Internet advertising and user information dominance, and only one is known as the Privacy Concern.
For every Facebook Beacon controversy there’s a Google Buzz one. But privacy concerns seem to stick with Facebook longer, perhaps because people can see directly what kind of personal information the site has about them.
That said, Facebook’s underhanded tactics have placed it in a very poor light. It’s hard to make a corporation like Google look like a victim, but Facebook has managed to do it.