Will Concealed Story Damage Image?

Google acknowledged Wednesday that two employees have been terminated after being caught in separate incidents allegedly spying on users' e-mails and chats. In July David Barksdale, an engineer for Google's Site Reliability team in Washingtong state, was fired for "violating company privacy policy." However, this story was covered up since July when the events actually occurred. Also, no legal action was taken against Barksdale and many experts are concerned by this. Google might need to utilize public relations research methods to conduct reputation management after this incident.

Yet "the company insists that it maintains careful control over employee access to user data, and said it’s amping up its log-monitoring to guard against similar violations in the future." It seems that Google was doing a good public relations job by admitting the truth, saying what they are going to change, making restrictions, and ensuring stakeholders that the "problem" will be fixed. The problem is, that this incident was covered up for two months, no legal action was taken, and experts have voiced their opinions on the matter.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, acknowledged that legal action wasn't compulsory, but should have been taken. Rotenberg said this incident “impacts the interests of individuals outside the company, I don’t think it’s sufficient for Google to handle it as an internal matter." Others have a more pessimistic view, insisting that more internal privacy breaches will occur, and possibly even increase. This can be a big problem for the Google Corporation in the next few weeks or even months. They are probably in the process of doing quantitative research, like surveys, and gathering data from qualitative research, probably by doing focus groups. With these research tools Google can learn the opinions of its various publics - shareholders, users, investors, clients, advertisers, etc - to assess the damage this has done and how to resolve the situation in satisfying manner.

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