Both Facebook and Google have had their share of embarrassing privacy blunders. Facebook had Beacon, and Google had Buzz. But the most recent privacy scandal to make headlines—surrounding a Gmail feature called Social Circles that pulls in data from users' friend connections—has become a scandal about botched PR. Facebook, apparently gunning for Google in an area where it doesn't look so hot itself, reportedly hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to do its dirty work.

The effort failed when privacy blogger Christopher Soghoian publicly posted the sleazy e-mail pitch he received. In part, the pitch read:

Google is at it again - and this time they are not only violating the personal privacy rights of millions of Americans, they are also infringing on the privacy rules and rights of hundreds of companies ranging from Yelp to Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn in what appears to be a first in web history: Google is collecting, storing and mining millions of people's personal information from a number of different online services and sharing it without the knowledge, consent or control of the people involved.

In an interview with Ben Popper at BetaBeat, Soghoian said that Google's Social Circle is far from his main privacy worry:

I'm a fairly outspoken privacy advocate and there are many things Google does that are really bad on privacy, but this isn't the thing that is keeping me up at night. It's something that I had never really worried about.

Soghoian told Popper that companies have recently realized that raising privacy issues is a way to score points against competitors. He continued:

The difference is Microsoft can do it publicly, because they don't have their own privacy problems. Facebook is no better than Google on these issues, so to make these attacks they have to hide behind these PR companies. If they tried it in public, under their own name, people would laugh in their faces.

Soghoian suggested that USA Today, which was the first news outlet to break the story, narrowly escaped being duped itself. The suggestion is plausible. The article, which leads with information about Burson-Marsteller, shifts to descriptions of users expressing shock about Social Circles:

Dion Moses, 25, a computer engineer in Ridgecrest, Calif., also wants out of Social Circle. "This is shocking," Moses says. "I had no idea that Google was doing this, and I pay close attention to most technology news sites."

The only way to disable Social Circle, [Google spokesman] Gaither says, is to stop using Gmail.

I'm not particularly shocked by revelations of the smear campaign, though the details are certainly fascinating. As The Register's Andrew Orlowski writes sarcastically:

Newspaper readers will be appalled to discover that a blushing, innocent maiden in Silicon Valley has had her reputation besmirched by wicked rival. Facebook's PR agency attempted to spin a blogger to write an unfavourable story about rival Google.

What's most important is that this story illustrates what a mess privacy is. Social Circles might indeed be something to worry about—if it weren't a minor infraction compared to the sorts of things that are happening all the time. Companies have access to huge amounts of users' personal data, and don't have to deal with much oversight about what they do with it.

Social-media researcher Danah Boyd summed the situation up well in a piece for TR last year:

Privacy is not simply about controlling access. It's about understanding a social context, having a sense of how our information is passed around by others, and sharing accordingly. As social media mature, we must rethink how we encode privacy into our systems.

Google wants social features very badly, it seems. Damon Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of Aardvark, an interesting search startup that integrates social interaction and artificial intelligence, has today confirmed reports that the company has been acquired by Google.

I wrote recently about the company's approach to search--Aardvark uses artificial intelligence to find the right people to answer a user's query. It then trusts those people to provide the desired information and refine the query as needed.

I've used Aardvark a great deal in the months since, and I've found it invaluable for answering questions that benefit from human guidance or opinion. It's a great place, for example, to ask "How do I get started making electronic music?" or "What's a mind-blowing novel of first contact?"

Aardvark claims more than 90,000 users and clearly has very promising technology. But I do worry about what Google plans to do with it. Aardvark works well partly due to close integration with Facebook, and Google doesn't seem to be on the social networking company's, ahem, friends list. Google may try to transplant the technology onto one of its own social structures, such as Google Talk. In that case, the company could face some backlash from users, similar to some of the early negative reactions to the automatically generated social networks for Google's new product Buzz.

Google has revealed its latest foray into the social space: a tool called Google Buzz that integrates with Gmail.

The basic idea is similar to the feed on a Facebook user's home page: Buzz allows a user to see a stream of comments, links, photos, and videos that have been shared with friends. But while the interface looks familiar, Google could have a real advantage in tying Buzz to other successful products to beef up its functionality and adoption. The company also seems to have been working hard to identify and solve several problems inherent to existing social networks.

Gmail users will be automatically subscribed to 40 people based on their e-mail and chat behavior. The Buzz page (already available to some users) will show items shared by these people, and it will also recommend items that a user might be interested in, even if those items were posted in their extended network. As with Twitter, a Buzz user can direct an item to a specific person by using an @reply. This sends the item to the friend's inbox, where it functions as a "live object," updating in real-time as others comment on it.

Whenever social sites like Twitter are discussed, the issue of signal-to-noise typically comes up, and Google seems to have a plan for that too: using location information to help decide which posts are most relevant to a user.

Buzz will also help users control who sees the items they share. Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, notes that "many users use one product to share things publicly and a separate product to share things privately." Buzz, on the other hand, has been built with a user interface that makes it easier to flip back and forth between public and private, in the hope that users will use it to perform both functions.

Google has also announced three efforts to promote Buzz on mobile phones. First: a mobile app for both the iPhone and Android; second: links to Buzz on Google's mobile home page; and third: integration of Buzz with Google Mobile Maps so that users can see items posted near a location. For the mobile versions of Buzz, users can also choose whether to have Google rank posts based on social considerations or proximity. Selecting the "nearby" option within Buzz shows items posted near the user's current location, regardless of whether they were posted by a friend.

Google says that Buzz will reach most Gmail users within the next few days; the mobile application is available at buzz.google.com.

During a press conference held in Mountain View, executives said there were many great opportunities to integrate Buzz with Google Wave. But to my eye Buzz takes many of the attractive features of Wave offered and pulls them into products that people actually use. This seems like a better way of executing these ideas.

The announcement also demonstrates the keenness of Google's recent push into real-time search. Google executives have said in the past that it's hard to determine the best ways to rank tweets. But having better access to information on user's social behavior will help the company rank trending items on its search page (which is, after all, still its main product).