n the continuing power struggle between Facebook and Google, a public relations firm hired by Facebook asked an IU researcher to get involved.
The news organization, The Daily Beast, revealed earlier this month that Facebook secretly hired a public relations firm to plant stories criticizing media giant Google.
One of Google’s most recent features is called Social Circle, an optional search engine that pulls publicly available information from social networks such as Facebook to allow users to see results that were posted by their friends about that topic.
“Google’s basic concern is trying to identify web sites, and perhaps other things, that people find interesting. Their traditional approach has been to have programs read the text and links of a website,” computer science professor Paul Purdom said. “Facebook is getting a lot of data based on people checking `Like,’ and Google has decided that such data could help improve their ratings of web sites.
“Since they don’t have any easy massive access to Facebook’s data, they want to get their own data. Facebook does not want this to happen.”
Computer science associate professor Minaxi Gupta provided further insight, explaining the situation from the companies’ points of view.
“The problem is that Google and Facebook in particular have complementary views of knowledge about their users’ behavior,” Gupta said. “While Facebook knows where they fit in the social graph of 600 million Facebook users, Google knows where a large fraction of the 2 billion Internet users go. They both want to know what the other party knows, and since a merge is unlikely to work out in the near future, they are using technical means to get what the other party has.”
Concerned about possible privacy violations of Social Circle, Facebook hired public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to ask security experts to ghostwrite stories criticizing the search feature.
One of the experts contacted by Burson-Marsteller was Christopher Soghoian, a Ph.D candidate in the School of Informatics and Computing and a graduate fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research.
Soghoian was unavailable for comment.
When Burson-Marsteller refused to reveal who it was working for, Soghoian publicized his email exchange with the firm and discussed the exchange through his Twitter account.
“Just pitched by PR firm wanting ghostwrite an anti-Google op-ed for me. I am quite capable of authoring my own anti-google stuff thank you,” his May 3 tweet read.
Burson-Martseller’s email even offered to assist Soghoian in the drafting of the op-ed.
In a New York Times article, Soghoian said he didn’t think the Social Circle feature is particularly problematic. Gupta disagreed and said she feels that Google’s Social Circle is an invasion of privacy.
“So is Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, which is not talked about as much,” she said.
Purdom agrees that both are an invasion of privacy.
“In a general sort of way, I expect all these services invade privacy somewhat,” he said.
The core problem, Gupta said, is the access to information.
“Facebook is upset because it may allow Google to know what it knows,” she said. “Just the same way, Google has a reason to be upset that Facebook is trying to learn what they know through the ‘Like’ button. It is all about advertising money.”
Gupta said the government provides a solution to the problem.
“We need better legislation that allows users to know what they are trading off when they get content for free,” Gupta said. “These companies have reasons to track users to maximize advertising dollars — they cannot offer new products otherwise. On the other hand, users who would rather pay for content than be tracked should have the means to do so.”
The controversy between Facebook and Google rages on and doesn’t appear to end anytime soon. Filippo Menczer, professor of computer science and informatics and associate director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, explained the larger picture.
“Social networks and social media are now the ground where we see the fastest progress in both research and products, so this is where the toughest competition is taking place among the large companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook and Twitter,” Menczer said. “The Burson story seems to be just one piece of
this picture.”
The battle, Gupta said, will continue until some legislation comes into effect.