Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has taken to Twitter and labelled Google worse than the NSA.

Here's The Dirty Digger's missive:

NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google. — Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) August 17, 2014

Murdoch and Google have history, with the former accusing the latter of stealing his newspapers' content (yet never putting in place a robots.txt file that would prevent search engines crawling it). Uncle Rupert has also criticised Google as enabling the theft of films by indexing torrent sites.

That Murdoch is hardly a paragon of privacy is being pointed out long and loud in replies to the Tweet, which aren't shy of asking just how The News of the World's infamous phone-hacking practices give the News Limited supremo a platform from which to criticise anyone else's position on privacy.

As is usually the case, Murdoch's not a part of that debate. His preferred Twitter style is to fire off something nasty, then disappear for a few days. So we've no idea just what his complaint is with Google, why he thinks an opt-in site is worse than a perhaps-not-entirely-constitutional surveillance program that collects data on individuals it has no reason to suspect deserve any scrutiny whatsoever. ®