Google is all for googling, as long as you don't google a Google executive.
That's the lesson that Jai Singh, CNET News.com founder and top editor, learned the hard way when the company informed him that no one from Google would speak to anyone at News.com for a full year.
Media Hack
"We are not happy with the situation and would like it to work out," Singh said. "Other companies have had issues with our reportage," but this was the first time he could recall a company actually blacklisting a news organization.
The boycott came to light last week when News.com began including a twist on the standard corporate response in articles relating to Google. It read, "Google could not be immediately reached for comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)"
That previous story, which News.com linked to, was headlined "Google Balances Privacy, Reach," and showed just how much information Google has placed at our fingertips. To illustrate, staff writer Elinor Mills spent 30 minutes googling Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive officer, then published Schmidt's net worth ($1.5 billion), his net gain from selling Google stock this year ($140 million), the town he calls home (Atherton, California), the fact that he is an amateur pilot and "roamed the desert at the Burning Man art festival in Nevada."
"That such detailed personal information is so readily available on public websites makes most people uncomfortable," Mills wrote. "But it's nothing compared with the information Google collects and doesn't make public." She worried that "hackers, zealous government investigators or even a Google insider who falls short of the company's ethics standards could abuse that information."
The question is how could a company like Google, which has become the toast of Wall Street, have such tone-deaf public relations?
CNET's Singh says all the right things about hoping News.com and Google can put this behind them. "Life as a reporter is easier if you have company officials and PR talking to you," he said. "We always try to get the other side. If you write about search you want to get their comments." But the truth is that Google getting its algorithms in a wad over this doesn't really affect CNET. It's not like Google flacks were feeding information to News.com reporters, a point Singh concedes.
The real loser is Google. Of the 300 or stories that News.com runs each week, Google is bound to be the subject of at least a few -- and each time, in the "interests of transparency," as Singh put it, News.com will include its "Google won't talk to our reporters" caveat. Not only that, but Slashdot and blogs -- both harbingers of memes, taste and trends -- have been abuzz over the issue.
One Slashdot post involved the writer googling another poster, starting with just an e-mail address. From just that start, they found his name, address, phone number, birth date, the fact he is a college student attending Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and that he hasn't traveled far from home in his 21 years. "You are a pseudo-intellectual and like to quote Voltaire," the poster added.
The New York Times, Associated Press and other mainstream media outlets also picked up on the story. The San Jose Mercury News headline called Google's "Blackout of Journalist a Black Eye for Internet Giant." Forbes.com labeled it an "arbitrary clampdown," and wondered whether its article would show up on Google. (It does, on Google News.) The San Francisco Chronicle said, "the search engine company evidently doesn't appreciate a taste of its own medicine."
All of this may lead people to the realization that Google is mighty prickly about privacy even as it erodes our own.
Nevertheless, Google does have a point: The type of information Mills published in her story could potentially be a security risk. In 1999, Liam Youens, armed with the work address of a woman he was stalking -- he paid $109 to internet search and information firm Docusearch for it -- shot and killed an old high school classmate, Amy Lynn Boyer, as she left work, then committed suicide. Information in the wrong hands can indeed be very dangerous. But if Google is going to profit from its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," it can't prevent news organizations from using it, too.
The result is Google has a pressing PR problem. The privacy issue is not going to go away, and as much as Google representatives would like us to believe the company would never do anything "evil" -- trust us, they say-- that's simply not good enough.
As a public company, Google has a legal obligation to its shareholders to increase revenue. There may be a time when "do no evil" comes into direct conflict with doing right by its shareholders. Instead of punishing reporters and news organizations that raise legitimate concerns about privacy, Google PR should meet the challenge head-on.
To find out what Google should do, I called my own publicist, Susan Lindner, founder and president of Lotus Public Relations, a Manhattan-based PR firm that focuses on technology and financial services. "Google needs to provide better-defined privacy policies," Lindner advised. "We need to know how well these databases are protected against hackers and identity thieves."
She also believes Google made a mistake when it told CNET it would boycott its reporters for a year. "That's something a celebrity or athlete would do," she said. "It would have been much better if Google hadn't said anything and just stopped talking to CNET." Google still would have gotten its message across without this public flogging.
Oh, and as if this needed to be said, Google's director of publicity, David Krane, wouldn't talk to me, either. "We haven't commented on this story," he wrote in an e-mail. "Apologies that I'm not able to be more helpful."
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Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and the assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the school's department of journalism.
