What’s the best PR strategy for ensuring that everybody in your major customer constituency reads a negative story about your company?

Google seems to have found it by making every reporter at CNet persona non grata among the search engine’s communications folks. The technology news site had dared to publish a story that demonstrated the privacy implications of Google by using the search engine’s own technology to unearth details of CEO Eric Schmidt’s personal life.

Needless to say, this spat as now been commented upon by every major blogger in the universe — oh, and the New York Times. (The Guardian’s news blog is not all that impressed, either.)

Meanwhile, commmenters on Google employee Jason Shellen’s blog correctly reject his argument that there is a difference between “public data” and “publicizing data”. The point is that Google has rendered that distinction trivial. That’s the whole point of the article that started all this!