Facebook is scared, says Chris Soghoian, the man who uncovered its Google smear campaign
This week’s revelation that Facebook has been running a smear campaign against Google has already caused a storm on this side of the Atlantic.
It’s likely to be the subject that will be awkward to avoid at the Zeitgeist Europe conference. Many, of course, won’t want to.
On Thursday, Facebook admitted that it had hired Burson-Marsteller, a US public relations firm that’s owned by the UK advertising giant WPP, to secretly place negative stories about Google’s privacy policies in the press.
Chris Soghoian, an online privacy and security researcher based in Washington DC, disclosed that he had been approached by Burson on behalf of an unnamed client, and Facebook’s identity eventually emerged.
“I think this incident reveals that Facebook now believes that Google is a threat to them, and is scared enough to try to covertly stab them in the back,” Mr Soghoian told The Telegraph. “This is the most surprising and interesting aspect of this scandal.”
Google and Facebook are engaged in a fierce tussle for online advertising revenues which, in the US alone, are forecast to reach $28.5bn (£17.6bn) this year, according to EMarketer, which analyses the market. The tactic employed by Facebook, which has said it hadn’t intended a smear campaign, also sheds some light on the often unseen lobbying technology giants use. Burson, for example, plays a role in ICOMP, a “net neutrality” pressure group that receives some funding from Microsoft. ICOMP has been behind the anti-trust complaints Google is facing in Europe over search.
