Under most NDA's, this would not matter. She originally received it as part of her employer. Most NDA's exclude the disclosing party telling you somehow else as a way of it becoming non-confidential.
Again, i'll just take the first sample NDA google finds (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/sample-confidentialit...)
" (c) learned by the Receiving Party through legitimate means other than from the Disclosing Party or Disclosing Party's representatives"
Google PR telling a reporter a thing is "learned by the Receiving party from the disclosing party", not through another means. There was also no written approval here.
Pretty much every NDA i've ever seen (somewhere in the hundreds or thousands) would still cover the situation where PR confirmed something to someone that they had learned in an NDA'd situation.
Whether reporters respect these NDA's or not is another story. But this isn't even a close call. I think you'd struggle to find an NDA this wouldn't be a violation of.
A huge portion have always supported disclosure by journalists even when such disclosure represents an obvious violation of the law.
In short please pardon my language. Fuck the law.
People are angry with Google for abusing their power as a search engine to prevent journalists publishing true negative stories about Google.
I don't think people are going to be less angry after you explain that Google are doing this via the "clever hack" of informing the news site's SEO team about the negative story under NDA and using that to bind the site's journalists.
> The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.
I suppose that Google counsel could have thought this through in advance, and realized that they could block press coverage by using NDAs with media organizations. But that seems like an iffy strategy.
No actually, i'm not. As my profile says, at Google i run the C++ language teams. I gave up lawyering in any capacity for Google years ago.