They are too young of a company to be pulling this sort of seedy stuff.
Also ‘privacy’?! I hope the irony isn’t lost on anyone. It wasn't very well thought-out, as when a net privacy panic starts spreading like wildfire through the media the consequences in political grandstanding and potential legislative action would hurt them as well.
So they come out of this looking like data-locking propaganda spreading assholes. Good job!
I don't think it was meant to be "ok" but more in line with the last ditch effort. Older companies might feel as though they have pulled all the stops and this is their last effort to make an impact.
I am not saying it is okay, just trying to shine some light on what I think yanw meant.
It could also be a 'We're the establishment, we don't care what others think now' vibe, instead of a last ditch effort that causes some companies to use seedy tactics.
They are too young of a company to be pulling this sort of seedy stuff.
I do not think this kind of seedy behavior is appropriate for company of any age, young or old. If anything, a company should get more responsible as it gets older.
According to the Daily Beast article linked from the Techcrunch article, Facebook admitted it: "Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service."
That seems like kind of a weird statement from a "Facebook spokesman" so I assume we are going to get some additional statements about this.
So Facebook admits that their intentions were good ("just needed to get this message out"), and Burson takes the fall for its unethical approach (while gaining reputation for other companies needing similar services). Meanwhile, mission accomplished in raising visibility on what Facebook PR intended--that when pieces about online privacy come up, there's an increased chance that Google will be mentioned in the same breath as Facebook.
I wonder what the ex googlers who moved to FaceBook think of such slimy tactics. Might be interesting to hear the perspective of someone who moved from a company that (at least) professes an adherence to "Don't be evil" to a company that apparently has no problems with jumping into the slime. If I worked for Facebook, I'd be ashamed of my employer today (and would probably protest and then get fired!).
And, as someone said above, Facebook professing a concern for abuse of privacy is a bit much to swallow.
It's not like this is the first evil thing Facebook has done.... there might be some who might argue that yanking around Facebook's defaults about users' privacy settings was far worse than using a PR sock puppet.
Personally, I think using (or perhaps we should say, trying to use) a PR sock puppet was cowardly, and trying to bash a competing product by spreading anonymous innuendoes was crass. But not all would agree with me. Some might even say that anything which is not illegal, is OK in our capitalistic society. And as far as I know, no laws were broken. That being said, I am so glad I don't work at Facebook.
Just because something is legal doesn't forbid you from thinking it's cowardly or crass. Facebook are free to do distasteful things, but - and here's the important part - we are free to condemn them for doing so. Forbidding us from sharing our opinions because "hey, it's legal" is a self-defeating argument.
I think the war against a former employer is an interesting position to be in but anybody who actually believes in the "Dont Be Evil" slogan anymore is a fool, even if they work at Google.
It's not that they are evil, but I don't think they are particularly different from any of the other decent corporations out there. When it comes to war (and, yes, this is war), companies will go to extreme lengths to win. This means also using questionable tactics. And I'm talking about Google, Facebook and any other huge player that has lots to lose in a war.
These Xooglers who moved over, surely must have known that they were switching from one team to another. The majority of these people, in the end, probably moved over because of the money/IPO/stock. So I imagine they expect their employer to bring guns to a knife fight.
Spoken like somebody that has never been anywhere near a war. How many casualities have there been in this Google/Facebook war? How many innocent civilians killed as collateral damage? How much forced migration resulting in starvation, out-of-control refugee situations, etc?
Good ol' Arrington... he's got the courage to call em out. To really stick it to the big guys. It takes guts to say "No More!" to the corrupt and the wicked, even when such a stance might cost you personally.
If you seriously don't have a Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL account, but do have a Google account, you really ought to take a step out of Google's back pocket and sign up for one of the other huge services on the internet.
I have an Facebook account, but I refuse to use my Facebook account. It is strictly for keeping in touch with friends, not for me to use to sign in to random services, and least of all to use outside of Facebook to leave comments. I have OpenID, and a Google account, those I can use to leave comments, or just give me a couple of text boxes, I'll fill in my name, email and website and comment and click submit like I have always done it.
Facebook is the last company I am going to voluntarily hand more data over to by using their commenting system on various sites.
Arrington's playing the numbers game too - more comments on his post means more people posting it to their facebook walls, in this case, I was happy to repost this because of my dislike for everything facebook stands for, despite the fact that I too use it for my own purposes ...
it's almost impossible not to be hypocritical in this day and age unless you live in a mud hut and eat wild berries!
Wait a minute – this story broke on a blog, and then got picked up by the Daily Beast, and then by Arrington. I guess you could give Arrington credit for spreading this story to his audience, but he doesn't deserve credit for calling Facebook out in the first place.
I wonder how employees feel about it - is it just business as usual? For that matter, I wonder how would-be investors feel about it.
Google defeated competition from Microsoft and Yahoo with innovation and hard work, not with slimy tactics. They dazzled the world by being open, provocative, fast and effective, forward-thinking, pushing web apps to their limits, giving customers what they wanted.
Is this it? Is Facebook the next Google? How depressing.
I'm pretty sure Facebook employees have been provided some rationalization about it - for example, "Google is pushing a creepy feature and stealing our content, we are just trying to make it public". Believe me, when you have $$$ riding on a side, believing their version of truth is extremely easy to do so, thats human psychology.
PR types are always dancing on the shadiness line. Sometimes I get suspicious about the comments on HN when negative stories about certain companies come out.
First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.
So, just to get this straight: Facebook resents that Google use's "Facebook data" in Social Circles, when I as the user have to explicitly allow Google to import my Facebook connections? Shouldn't the user get a say in how their data is used and who uses it?
You do get a say - you got a say that Facebook could have your data. At least in the US, that makes it their data - we have no eTRUST or other Privacy law/data ownership laws in place to say otherwise.
This doesn't seem like it would be a very popular point of view with the people giving data to Facebook (or whom want to share it with Google or other companies).
Not anymore, they took that off a while ago. Funny thing is for a while the gmail logo still appeared even though when you clicked it to import via gmail it didn't have the option.
Actually, you don't explicitly allow Google to import the data. Google does the following:
a) scrape Facebook.com;
b) notice that someone named "Roderick Evans" on Facebook is friends with someone named "Danielle Benson" on Facebook;
c) notice that someone named Roderick Evans' GMail account has someone named Danielle Benson in his contacts;
d) they're done. Your permission is not part of the process.
Your Facebook identity is now associated with your Google profile, and your Google profile gets associated connecting edges, without your permission or notice. If by some miracle you swing by your Google profile, and you notice that your Quora/Twitter/MySpace/Facebook accounts have all suddenly been connected, you can sever them, but I received no notice of the connection beforehand.
Doesn't the Facebook user need to allow their connections to be publicly accessed via the Graph API in order for it to be scrape-able in the first place?
The main point here is that Google isn't doing anything with the "Facebook data" that the original user of that data (who actually owns it, let's be fair about that) hasn't approved of in one way or another.
Not sure about the Graph API, but your name, your profile picture, and your contact list are all fully public information and you can't control their visibility.
Friends can be accessed similarly, but require an access token (_any_ access token, not just the user's that you're inspecting.
This would seem to be a bug if so, according to this page in the FB documentation: To get additional information about a user, you must first get their permission. At a high level, you need to get an access token for the Facebook user. After you obtain the access token for the user, you can perform authorized requests on behalf of that user by including the access token in your Graph API requests:
That's my list of the first 50 people who joined Facebook, using the Graph API & a bit of Java. Look for Saverin, Zuckerberg, Moskovitz & rest of the gang. Its all in there!
Wrote this to find the first million facebook signons.
No, there's no permission involved on the Google or Facebook side, or at least, there wasn't for me.
My understanding from Google's description above is that they are scraping the logged out facebook.com profiles; your logged out profile has a random selection of friends on it. There are enough of them there for Google to infer that facebook.com/kma (me, who is friends with Nick Schrock, e.g.) is the same Keith Adams as kmadams_at_gmail_dot_com (also me, who also has written emails to someone named Nick Schrock). Without clicking through anything on either site, I started getting little faces in my search results last month saying "So-And-So, your friend on Facebook, shared this on Twitter."
Disclosure: I write code for Facebook. I had nothing to do with this whole thing, and cannot officially speak for FB. It could also be the case that I am in a A/B test Google is performing, etc. This was just my experience. It fits with Google's stated mechanisms for how Social Circles work.
can you point to somewhere talking about facebook accounts getting added, especially without any kind of notification?
I've never heard of that, just easy ones like twitter accounts (which, by the way, required both notification and permission when google asked if it was me and if I wanted my twitter account to be associated with my google profile).
Who cares? Facebook is a generic company. Google is a generic company. If they spy on each, smash each other, etc, it changes nothing. Neither for you nor for your startup or anything.
Personifying these companies and then writing gossip stories about them is turning what should be real business into some kind of pseudo-fashion magazine.
Just as little as I care for Snookie kissing JWoww, do I care about Facebook spying on google. The impact of this is minimally negligible in the world of real business, and something like this is just pointless gossip.
Goodwill and brand have value, and public opinion affects laws that get written. The very fact that Facebook was doing this means perception matters. It's not like FB and Google are making money from artificial drama, so I think your analogy is specious.
Honestly, I'm shocked my the downvotes being levied against all of these "who cares" type posts.
How much face is really being lost by Facebook? The audience of Facebook users that will read about the "negative PR campaign" will be infantesimally small (compared to their near 500 million accounts).
Then compare that infantesimally small number of users to the percentage who didn't already know that Facebook was dodgy as hell.
The relative impact of this discovery, while interesting, makes no difference in anything (save as being direct proof of Facebook's "Be Evil" corporate policy).
Anyways.
I'm happy to take it on the chin in terms of downvotes here too, but the way I see it there's nothing here that will impact anything.
Note that at least in France, this made the front page on the website of all major newspaper (Le Monde, Liberation, etc.). It's probably the same in many european country where Facebook is sometimes struggling to keep a clean image.
Look at me and my Ethnocentricity! How true that there are other cultures where these services are still trying to get traction and expose's like this one can have an actual impact.
A key saying I provide all my clients with in regards to corporate culture and behaviours: a fish rots from the head.
Usually this means things like 'if the boss is ten minutes late to every meeting, staff will assume it's acceptable for everyone to be ten minutes late to a meeting'.
Given Zuckerbeg's reputation for sneaky behaviour and this example of his PR team, I now have an excellent example to share in the future: 'If the boss uses sneaky, underhanded and/or arrogant methods to launch 'his' business, staff will assume it's acceptable for them to use sneaky underhanded and/or arrogant methods to promote it'.
> I now have an excellent example to share in the future
Your comment intuitively seems correct, and I'm inclined to agree with you. But I can't help but wonder if you just end up picking examples that support this claim. Most examples of corporate wrong-doing probably can't be correlated with traits of their CEO (they're just mistakes made by inept, or possibly malicious, individuals or groups).
Statistically, some percentage of corporate wrong-doing will correlate to some event in the CEO's past. I'm not sure that necessarily means that we can point to those cases as proof that a fish rots from the head.
Saying that the "head" has to be the CEO is taking it too far.
In most large companies, you are only aware of the behaviour of the two levels of management above you. If you see your boss or your bosses boss behave in a certain way, you will think that this behaviour is acceptable.
For example, the CEO of some bank might be very long-term, risk free, investement oriented, but if the boss of the trading desk only cares about the next paycheck and is willing to take risks to get his bonus, chances are all the traders will do whatever it takes to get good results without more than a year ahead.
I work in a company of about 140k people and I'm far more aware of the CEO than I am my boss or his boss. I don't even know who my boss' boss is or what he does, but I hear about the CEO on a regular basis (beyond just showing up in movies). It seems to me that in a large company, you're aware of your boss and the figureheads and everywhere in-between those two levels are given the gift of obfuscation.
The personality of the CEO trickles down to the rest of the organization. His VPs take his philosophy to their subordinates, and so on and so forth. Not only that, but the CEO's policy decisions directly affect the culture of an organization.
It seems to me that organizations tend to take on the personality of the strongest person in the chain. EVERY large company has one or two rogue units inside of it that behave very differently (usually for the better) than the overall culture. In each case I've dealt with, there has been a leader who had a tremendously strong personality that drowned out everything above him.
Most of the time, however, middle management tends to reflect and pass-on the tone and traits that the CEO presents just as you say.
Most examples of corporate wrong-doing probably can't be correlated with traits of their CEO (they're just mistakes made by inept, or possibly malicious, individuals or groups).
Nobody expects the CEO to be an angel. What's important is how the CEO reacts when someone under him screws up at the expense of customers, stockholders, or both.
Case in point, the Sony rootkit fiasco. Products go out the door with Sony's name on them, equipped with a 'feature' that would get any of us little people hauled before a judge on criminal charges. Response from the executive suite? Promote the manager responsible to President of the Global Digital Business division. Fast forward a few years, and consumers are still wandering around with confused, vaguely hurt looks on their faces, wondering why they never seem to get a square deal from Sony.
Same situation with Facebook: can a leopard change his spots?
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When I hear "Facebook," I immediately think of Zuckerberg. I'm guessing a lot of the reporters out there are making the same correlation. I wonder, though, is this something he knew about (or, rather, did he know about a PR campaign but not of this nature)? It seems a bit out of character for a guy who has been portrayed as being a very calm and calculated person. I wonder if this was just a bit of activity in the PR room that didn't get to the top before it was released...
I see no difference, or impact on my life, between this Google/Facebook billionaire's catfight and any Twitter-borne beef between two or more millionaire celebritainers.
Color me perplexed by Facebook's move here. Not only is the blowback from this effort bad PR, but I fail to see what FB stood to gain from this in the first place. Generating a bunch of bad publicity and calling attention to Google's alleged invasions of privacy is just going to bring scrutiny down upon FB eventually -- regardless of whether or not this plot ever came to light.
I mean, did they think it would be a tremendous leap of the imagination for the court of public opinion and/or regulators to ask themselves "Hey, so Google is sketchy on user data...hmm...I wonder what other company might have a boatload of such data?"
my guess is that they hoped to pull themselves up as they pulled google down. they probably feel like they are doing nothing wrong, and that it's unfair that they are criticised more than google. so they want to "level the playing field".
i don't think they thought it through in absolute terms, just as "getting even".
but if you want a pro-fb response, i'd suggest going to quora and asking there (or just searching - there's probably already a discussion). they have a couple of ex-fb people who will provide some "balance" (in particular, look for yishan wong).
For there to be negative-PR blowback on this, the user-base will have to pull their heads out of their asses and stop playing FarmVille for five minutes. Even then, chances are they'll shrug and go back to harvesting self-esteem from their facebook "friends".
I think Farmville reveals a lot about the human condition. I'm totally serious. What it basically tells us is that, if left to their own devices, most people will just waste whatever time they've got. If Facebook or Farmville weren't around, it would be something else. Remember annoying email mass-forwards from your relatives and their friends? That's the kind of stuff that's no longer plaguing us because Farmville is keeping those folks occupied. And for that, in a strange and perverse way, I'm thankful for its existence.
They have also moved to text messages. It is rather amusing seeing the necessary mechanics of that type of meme distilled down to so few characters. No room to waste buttering up your emotions. No, they get right down to things like "Fwd to 10 people or BAD LUCK is on you tonight!"
Luckily, a tech company like Facebook lives and dies by its reputation with not just its users but also, among other groups, the developer community.
Look at how much posturing companies put into looking like 'cool' places to work, in order to attract top technical talent. At this point in time I think any prospective Facebook hire will be thinking long and hard about whether the technical challenges and money are worth selling his soul to what appears to be the douchiest internet company around.
Not sure what the big deal is here. Big companies run negative PR campaigns against other companies ALL the time -- running negative PR campaigns is a very common strategy in the large market. But I supposed they usually run try to run them in secret, so it is a bit unfortunate that they got caught.
If anything an article like this makes me lose face for techcrunch, who acts like this kind of PR tactic has never happened before.
If you don't believe me read Toxic Sludge, which is a book about the PR industry.
It also makes you wonder when you are reading this story somewhere if Google has their PR agency running it as a negative PR campaign against Facebook.
I guarantee you that Google is running it as a negative PR campaign against Facebook. There's no way someone would sabotage their relationship with Facebook when they're paying the bills.
Doesn't seem very secret to me. If it was secret people wouldn't know about it. A secret smear is a whisper, not a newspaper article. Furthermore its not a smear if its true. So, 2 lies in the headline. I clicked on the link to verify that it had no information, as things with 2 obvious lies in the headline are wont to do. I have verified that there is no information at the link.
149 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadAlso ‘privacy’?! I hope the irony isn’t lost on anyone. It wasn't very well thought-out, as when a net privacy panic starts spreading like wildfire through the media the consequences in political grandstanding and potential legislative action would hurt them as well.
So they come out of this looking like data-locking propaganda spreading assholes. Good job!
Referenced article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-12/fa...
Is there a time in a company's existence when it's "ok" to do something like this?
I am not saying it is okay, just trying to shine some light on what I think yanw meant.
It could also be a 'We're the establishment, we don't care what others think now' vibe, instead of a last ditch effort that causes some companies to use seedy tactics.
I do not think this kind of seedy behavior is appropriate for company of any age, young or old. If anything, a company should get more responsible as it gets older.
That seems like kind of a weird statement from a "Facebook spokesman" so I assume we are going to get some additional statements about this.
Top of page 2 of the original article.
Seems like politics 101.
And, as someone said above, Facebook professing a concern for abuse of privacy is a bit much to swallow.
stock options non olet, I guess...
Personally, I think using (or perhaps we should say, trying to use) a PR sock puppet was cowardly, and trying to bash a competing product by spreading anonymous innuendoes was crass. But not all would agree with me. Some might even say that anything which is not illegal, is OK in our capitalistic society. And as far as I know, no laws were broken. That being said, I am so glad I don't work at Facebook.
It's not that they are evil, but I don't think they are particularly different from any of the other decent corporations out there. When it comes to war (and, yes, this is war), companies will go to extreme lengths to win. This means also using questionable tactics. And I'm talking about Google, Facebook and any other huge player that has lots to lose in a war.
These Xooglers who moved over, surely must have known that they were switching from one team to another. The majority of these people, in the end, probably moved over because of the money/IPO/stock. So I imagine they expect their employer to bring guns to a knife fight.
Spoken like somebody that has never been anywhere near a war. How many casualities have there been in this Google/Facebook war? How many innocent civilians killed as collateral damage? How much forced migration resulting in starvation, out-of-control refugee situations, etc?
OK, fine, "corporate war."
Happy? You must be great at parties.
I was going to comment as such on his blog...
...but I don't have a facebook account. ;)
Facebook is the last company I am going to voluntarily hand more data over to by using their commenting system on various sites.
it's almost impossible not to be hypocritical in this day and age unless you live in a mud hut and eat wild berries!
I wonder how employees feel about it - is it just business as usual? For that matter, I wonder how would-be investors feel about it.
Google defeated competition from Microsoft and Yahoo with innovation and hard work, not with slimy tactics. They dazzled the world by being open, provocative, fast and effective, forward-thinking, pushing web apps to their limits, giving customers what they wanted.
Is this it? Is Facebook the next Google? How depressing.
But, every ad company and security organization has access to Facebook's data. They are bitching about Google?
"Its ok if you're going to screw with my users, just dont compete me"
FB complaining about privacy abuses just broke my irony meter.
First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.
So, just to get this straight: Facebook resents that Google use's "Facebook data" in Social Circles, when I as the user have to explicitly allow Google to import my Facebook connections? Shouldn't the user get a say in how their data is used and who uses it?
a) scrape Facebook.com; b) notice that someone named "Roderick Evans" on Facebook is friends with someone named "Danielle Benson" on Facebook; c) notice that someone named Roderick Evans' GMail account has someone named Danielle Benson in his contacts; d) they're done. Your permission is not part of the process.
Your Facebook identity is now associated with your Google profile, and your Google profile gets associated connecting edges, without your permission or notice. If by some miracle you swing by your Google profile, and you notice that your Quora/Twitter/MySpace/Facebook accounts have all suddenly been connected, you can sever them, but I received no notice of the connection beforehand.
At least, that was how it worked for me before I deleted my Google profile. It's described in more flowery terms here: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...
The main point here is that Google isn't doing anything with the "Facebook data" that the original user of that data (who actually owns it, let's be fair about that) hasn't approved of in one way or another.
If I go to http://graph.facebook.com/<myusername>, the only data that is visible is:
Friends can be accessed similarly, but require an access token (_any_ access token, not just the user's that you're inspecting.
More details at Facebook's API docs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/
This would seem to be a bug if so, according to this page in the FB documentation: To get additional information about a user, you must first get their permission. At a high level, you need to get an access token for the Facebook user. After you obtain the access token for the user, you can perform authorized requests on behalf of that user by including the access token in your Graph API requests:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
curl https://socialgraph.googleapis.com/otherme?q=<yourgmaila...
Here's what they have to say about me, to anybody with a web browser, even though I've tried my hardest to opt out:
https://socialgraph.googleapis.com/otherme?q=facebook.com/km...
{"http://twitter.com/keithmadams:{attributes:{atom:http://twit... at Facebook, dad, cyclist.","exists":"1","rss":"http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/keithmadams.rss,ur...},"http://www.quora.com/keith-adams:{attributes:{exists:1,photo... Adams","url":"http://www.quora.com/keith-adams,profile:http://www.quora.co...
That's my list of the first 50 people who joined Facebook, using the Graph API & a bit of Java. Look for Saverin, Zuckerberg, Moskovitz & rest of the gang. Its all in there!
Wrote this to find the first million facebook signons.
My understanding from Google's description above is that they are scraping the logged out facebook.com profiles; your logged out profile has a random selection of friends on it. There are enough of them there for Google to infer that facebook.com/kma (me, who is friends with Nick Schrock, e.g.) is the same Keith Adams as kmadams_at_gmail_dot_com (also me, who also has written emails to someone named Nick Schrock). Without clicking through anything on either site, I started getting little faces in my search results last month saying "So-And-So, your friend on Facebook, shared this on Twitter."
Here's a screenshot of the results I was seeing:
http://imgur.com/0ctAO
Disclosure: I write code for Facebook. I had nothing to do with this whole thing, and cannot officially speak for FB. It could also be the case that I am in a A/B test Google is performing, etc. This was just my experience. It fits with Google's stated mechanisms for how Social Circles work.
I've never heard of that, just easy ones like twitter accounts (which, by the way, required both notification and permission when google asked if it was me and if I wanted my twitter account to be associated with my google profile).
Personifying these companies and then writing gossip stories about them is turning what should be real business into some kind of pseudo-fashion magazine.
Just as little as I care for Snookie kissing JWoww, do I care about Facebook spying on google. The impact of this is minimally negligible in the world of real business, and something like this is just pointless gossip.
How much face is really being lost by Facebook? The audience of Facebook users that will read about the "negative PR campaign" will be infantesimally small (compared to their near 500 million accounts).
Then compare that infantesimally small number of users to the percentage who didn't already know that Facebook was dodgy as hell.
The relative impact of this discovery, while interesting, makes no difference in anything (save as being direct proof of Facebook's "Be Evil" corporate policy).
Anyways.
I'm happy to take it on the chin in terms of downvotes here too, but the way I see it there's nothing here that will impact anything.
Thanks for pointing that out :)
Usually this means things like 'if the boss is ten minutes late to every meeting, staff will assume it's acceptable for everyone to be ten minutes late to a meeting'.
Given Zuckerbeg's reputation for sneaky behaviour and this example of his PR team, I now have an excellent example to share in the future: 'If the boss uses sneaky, underhanded and/or arrogant methods to launch 'his' business, staff will assume it's acceptable for them to use sneaky underhanded and/or arrogant methods to promote it'.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532918
Your comment intuitively seems correct, and I'm inclined to agree with you. But I can't help but wonder if you just end up picking examples that support this claim. Most examples of corporate wrong-doing probably can't be correlated with traits of their CEO (they're just mistakes made by inept, or possibly malicious, individuals or groups).
Statistically, some percentage of corporate wrong-doing will correlate to some event in the CEO's past. I'm not sure that necessarily means that we can point to those cases as proof that a fish rots from the head.
In most large companies, you are only aware of the behaviour of the two levels of management above you. If you see your boss or your bosses boss behave in a certain way, you will think that this behaviour is acceptable.
For example, the CEO of some bank might be very long-term, risk free, investement oriented, but if the boss of the trading desk only cares about the next paycheck and is willing to take risks to get his bonus, chances are all the traders will do whatever it takes to get good results without more than a year ahead.
I work in a company of about 140k people and I'm far more aware of the CEO than I am my boss or his boss. I don't even know who my boss' boss is or what he does, but I hear about the CEO on a regular basis (beyond just showing up in movies). It seems to me that in a large company, you're aware of your boss and the figureheads and everywhere in-between those two levels are given the gift of obfuscation.
Most of the time, however, middle management tends to reflect and pass-on the tone and traits that the CEO presents just as you say.
It's really an interesting dynamic.
Nobody expects the CEO to be an angel. What's important is how the CEO reacts when someone under him screws up at the expense of customers, stockholders, or both.
Case in point, the Sony rootkit fiasco. Products go out the door with Sony's name on them, equipped with a 'feature' that would get any of us little people hauled before a judge on criminal charges. Response from the executive suite? Promote the manager responsible to President of the Global Digital Business division. Fast forward a few years, and consumers are still wandering around with confused, vaguely hurt looks on their faces, wondering why they never seem to get a square deal from Sony.
Same situation with Facebook: can a leopard change his spots?
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I mean, did they think it would be a tremendous leap of the imagination for the court of public opinion and/or regulators to ask themselves "Hey, so Google is sketchy on user data...hmm...I wonder what other company might have a boatload of such data?"
i don't think they thought it through in absolute terms, just as "getting even".
but if you want a pro-fb response, i'd suggest going to quora and asking there (or just searching - there's probably already a discussion). they have a couple of ex-fb people who will provide some "balance" (in particular, look for yishan wong).
Look at how much posturing companies put into looking like 'cool' places to work, in order to attract top technical talent. At this point in time I think any prospective Facebook hire will be thinking long and hard about whether the technical challenges and money are worth selling his soul to what appears to be the douchiest internet company around.
If anything an article like this makes me lose face for techcrunch, who acts like this kind of PR tactic has never happened before.
If you don't believe me read Toxic Sludge, which is a book about the PR industry.
Kettle calling the pot black did not have enough impact for this context for me.