Facebook owns up to anti-Google smears.(News)

Byline: From Daniel Bates in New York

FACEBOOK has admitted hiring a 'dirty tricks' PR firm to smear Google and stoke fears that it compromised users' privacy.

The social network website asked Burson-Marsteller to start a secret whispering campaign by planting negative stories in newspapers.

The PR firm, which represented the Argentinian junta during the Falklands War and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, touted scaremongering stories for an unnamed client, attacking Google's new Social Circle service.

Although Facebook was not identified, it owned up to being behind the campaign when confronted with leaked emails.

Social Circle is the most direct challenge yet to Facebook. It will reportedly allow users to share photos, videos and status updates. But Facebook claims the service collects data from it and other services without authorisation.

The plan was uncovered when Burson-Marsteller approached U.S. privacy blogger Christopher Soghoian, asking him to write about Social Circle.

It promised to help him get it published in high-profile newspapers including the Washington Post, and included a damning assessment of Google, saying it had 'a well-known history of infringing privacy rights'.

It said Social Circle was 'designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users'.

But Mr Soghoian demanded to know who was behind the story. When Burson-Marsteller refused to divulge the name, he published its emails online.

Matthew Ingram, of the technology analyst GigaOm, said Facebook's actions smacked of 'desperation', adding: 'Large corporations hiring PR companies to plant negative articles in the press about their competitors isn't exactly a new phenomenon. But this is the first sign that Facebook has taken to using these sleazy tactics against Google.'

A Facebook spokesman said: '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 Social Circle, 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. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.'

Google and Facebook are increasingly bitter rivals over the future of social networking and internet communications.

Facebook has 600million users and is by far the largest social network, but sees Google as its biggest threat.

But both have been criticised for their privacy policies. While Facebook provoked users' fury when it tried to make more content public, Google was savaged for secretly collecting users' data from wi-fi networks when filming its Streetview service.