"Burson-Marsteller has acknowledged the campaign and issued the following statement, courtesy of FT:posted by ericb at 10:13 AM on May 12, 2011'Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle.'"*
"Facebook has issued the following statement:posted by ericb at 10:15 AM on May 12, 2011 [1 favorite]"No 'smear' campaign was authorized or intended. Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles—just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.
You and your readers can look at the feature and decide if they have approved of this collection and use of information by clicking here when their Google account is open: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social. Of course, people who do not have Gmail accounts are still included in this collection but they have no way to view or control it."*
"Burson-Marsteller has acknowledged the campaign and issued the following statement, courtesy of FT:'Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle.'"*
This is the kind of unethical behavior I've come to expect from Zuckerberg and his CxOs. What a shitty place to work for.Not if you're totally unethical!
"Facebook today denied that it may have accidentally exposed personal user data to advertisers and other third parties for several years, as claimed this week by two security researchers at Symantec Corp."posted by ericb at 10:25 AM on May 12, 2011
"People are freaking out because Facebook hired a public relations firm to plant stories attacking Google in the press. Guess what? This happens all the time. Google does it, too. Here's a story we wrote about Microsoft's efforts back in 2009…"posted by ericb at 1:58 PM on May 12, 2011
Hrmm - I went and looked at my "social connections" on Google - I don't seem to have any. So even if this DOES violate my privacy in some way, Google doesn't seem to have automatically opted me into it, the way that Facebook most assuredly would have. So I'm fine with it. :)Do you chat with anyone on Google chat? Those are my 'main' contacts on that thing. The other thing is, when Google buzz came out I 'added' my twitter and flickr data, or something. So some of the 'contacts' are people I don't even know who I happened to follow on twitter (which rarely ever use)
It's heartening to know that the company that did PR for Union Carbide in the aftermath of Bhopal, for Ceauşescu's government, for Indonesia's government when they were getting all that bad press over that little East Timor massacre misunderstanding, for the Argentinan military dictatorship while they were in the middle of the Dirty War, has principles.Their CEO, Mark Penn ran Hillary Clinton's primary campaign.
« Older Bartolo Colon, now of the New York Yankees, underw... | There’s a new indie film in th... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by AwkwardPause at 9:57 AM on May 12, 2011