Seems like a good time to revist Paul's essay "The Submarine:"
PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.
If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.
A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.
Selective truth != truth. I'd say selectively presenting one side is dishonest. I don't have anything against companies who are dishonest, but let's call a spade a spade: PR companies are spin doctors. They're dishonest. That's not quite straight out lying, but to me the very definition of dishonesty is not presenting all of the truth if you can.
You're right, but "dishonesty" is a dirty word, despite not necessarily always being bad or immoral. It's up to journalists to perform balanced reporting. We trust them to do that.
Lazy journalists that simply rewrite press releases, emails from their friends, or otherwise fail to do any meaningful research are the ones truly deserving of the label "dishonest" (amongst others!).
>I'd say selectively presenting one side is dishonest.
do you vote with your dollars in this regard?
If there was a bigger PR penalty for not revealing unpleasant truths and maybe more support for a company that does reveal unpleasant truths about itself, more companies would be more open.
"Legacy" PR being based on one-way broadcasting of a message and manipulating perception. It is just fundamentally flawed. There is a PR 2.0 movement which moves away from this stuff and is much better.
I think the story's notable to people because it highlights the pervasiveness of this kind of thing. Good reminder to keep your critical thinking hat on.
Google has far more sensitive information on me than Facebook. Facebook only has publicly facing information, stuff that you've already shared with other people.
Google has my searches, and what I've clicked on. And good luck trying to get them to forget those logs.
Unfortunately, you are not representative of the average Facebook user. The average Facebook user is much less privacy savvy.
Not everyone uses Google (most do), and Gmail surprisingly isn't the most popular internet mail.
Facebook may not know as much about you, but they often know much more detailed information (ie, where you were last night).
Most of Facebook's users don't consider their "wall" to be public despite the fact that Facebook defaults it to be so (and has repeatedly reset privacy settings in the past to be "more public"). Complicate this with the fact that others can "implicate" you with their messages written on your wall. Despite you hiding them, they are there, in Facebook's servers just like your Google searches... except you didn't write them.
Unfortunately, you are not representative of the average Facebook user. The average Facebook user is much less privacy savvy.
Facebook doesn't know anything about anyone that they're not comfortable sharing with at least one other person. Google knows things about people they would never share with anyone. That's a fundamental difference, not related to privacy savvy.
Facebook does have lots of dirt people only want to share with a few people, however.
The "like" button is for publicly sharing your interest in a web page.
And for tracking where I've been, Facebook is no worse than any other ad agency; that they show me that they're tracking me is no worse than DoubleClick's or Google Ads' tracking.
Facebook has a lot more than you're giving them credit for.
You're only counting data given to them directly, as if the things you tell Facebook are the only things there. They also have a lot of data based on what they infer from your behavior. The most visible aspect of that would be when they recommend people for you to friend.
And then there's all the data other people give them about you. Oh, sure, you can untag the photos or whatever, but who knows if Facebook really forgets? I can just imagine the uprising if Facebook ever sorted through all the photos where the tag was removed, compared them to the tagged photos to make sure it was the right person, then started selling "X's Embarrassing Photo Collection" or something. No, they'd never do that for obvious reasons, but they still have that kind of data.
What I'm trying to say is that they have more information than you realize. I'm not saying that they will or won't do anything bad with it, just that they have it. So whether you care or not depends on how much you trust them.
For the record, Google has plenty of data, too. I personally trust Google a bit more than most companies, but that's just my opinion and it could always change.
That's kind of patronizing, of course I know that Facebook has all that information. (And though I'm annoyed at the moment, thanks for engaging me, this is an interesting discussion)
You're still missing the point: when information is put into Facebook by me or others, the intent is to share it with others. Facebook is not a vehicle to do things in private, the entire purpose of it is to share with others, whether that be your list of connections, your photos, how much time you waste on Farmville, or how frequently you communicate with Aunt Tilly.
Facebook is the anti-privacy, it's a public space, a place to get things out in the open. There's nothing private at all about Facebook, and that's the entire point of it. It's what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web to be, and what it would have been had he been able to put useable authoring tools into the hands of the masses, instead of HTML being limited to the benighted few that can afford the time investment to learning it and working with a web server.
Google, on the other hand, pretends to be an ISP with implicit promise of privacy, but will exploit the fuck out of your private email recipient list just to try to do what Facebook is doing. Google's core business is the same as Facebook's, advertising, but Facebook goes about gathering data about you in a far more transparent and clear manner than Google.
When somebody gives all that juicy personal information to Facebook, they're doing it with the intent to share and are making it public of their own volition for their personal social benefit. When somebody gives personal information to Google, they're not giving their search terms to Google in order to share search terms, they're doing it get something else in exchange, but may very well wish they could keep that juicy personal information completely private.
IMHO, trusting Google more than Facebook or Microsoft or Apple is extremely foolhardy, and a testament to how far a catchy slogan can go on the PR front. It doesn't matter how well-intentioned the people at the top of Google are, failures to adhere to policy will happen, and the Buzz incident is just how flagrantly Google will fail at "not being evil" when they're desperate.
I should note that my Facebook account sits idle because of my paranoia about it. But at least everything Facebook has, I wanted to be public. Google has me by the balls.
Facebook knows how many seconds you've spent looking at every photo on their site, whose home pages you visit most often, and who you message most frequently. They know every article you've ever visited that has a "Like" button on it, whether you've clicked it or not. And, unlike Google, they don't anonymize this information after N months.
I think he's referring to the lack of privacy and information control even within Facebook - there are persistent claims from former engineers there that user privacy isn't taken seriously, and that breaches of user privacy by employees occurs often and with relative impunity.
As a current engineer at Facebook, I would be really surprised to read anyone claiming we don't "take it seriously." It absorbs an enormous amount of engineering effort, thought around new products, and even cap ex: computing visibility for objects whose permissions are "friends of friends", for example, is computationally expensive.
What of the claims that information control is extremely loose internally - i.e., an employee can easily gain access to users' private data without sufficient gating, and that accesses such as these are not easily auditable?
When Zuckerberg is running around saying that wanting to share things with only certain people shows a "lack of integrity" (http://eparnell.net/?p=169), it's not an unreasonable preconception.
Still, my point stands, when it comes to email and chatting, I expect 100% privacy, which Google already violated once with Buzz and now seems to be doing the same thing again with Social Circle or whatever.
With Facebook, I just assume everything could be made public, so I don't put private info that I don't want others to know.
This is pretty standard -- get anti-Google (and Microsoft, and Apple) pitches all the time. About the only thing that isn't standard is the fact that the PR firm won't say who their client is. That pretty much never happens (at least to me). So the fact that they won't say who it is makes it kinda interesting, but it could just be some nutjob somewhere who decided to spend his money on hiring a PR firm.
John Mercurio is the the Director of the Media practice in Burson-Marsteller and more interestingly, "a leading political expert on national politics, campaigns and Capitol Hill"
Google crawls publicly available data and uses it -- scandal! This is getting old, but it seems like some people still need a reminder: If you submit information about yourself that you know will be publicly viewable, you have no right at all to anger. I think that some people truly still do not understand how the internet works, and think that login page == walled garden privacy.
>The service also privately sends each Gmail user the names of "secondary connections," a listing of the people each direct connection happens to be following publicly on the Web.
So it will show me the friends of my friends? What is this obsession with degrading privacy in this way? Didn't Google learn lessons from the way Buzz exposed your friends to other friends? Why can't email and chat be just that? If I want social networking I will use a social networking site.
If this continues, I will look at making another email service my primary email.
I am very surprised this is the first time someone try to get everyone's attention on this practice (if that's the intention of the poster/submitter). It's quite easy to spot recently there are well-timed attacks on Google or Android which are oddly fueled with passion. I suppose any money spent on this (which should be significant) would be way better used if it's used to improve whatever product the client have in competition with Google, really. End users, ultimately, won't benefit from these.
Scandals rarely are. Someone gives or receives money, favors, or information inappropriately. It's the perceived degree of impropriety that makes something scandalous, not how commonly it occurs.
I'm glad that this sample is available, there were always the rumors about another big PR firm 'Edelman' hired for this sort of thing, the subject isn't always privacy they are also beating the antitrust drum, Google spokesman in DC called it then an 'Anti-Google industry complex'.
PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.
If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.
A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html