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Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books

Posted by Soulskill on from the where's-my-say dept.

jcombel writes "When you sign in to Facebook, you had the option of importing your email contacts, to 'friend' them all on the social network. Importing the other way — easily copying your Facebook contacts to Gmail — required jumping through considerable copy/paste hoops or third-party scripts. Google said enough is enough, and they're no longer helping sites that don't allow two-way contact merging. The stated intention is standing their ground to persuade other sites into allowing users to have control of where their data goes — but will this just lead to more sites putting up 'data walls?'"

14 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. You can't have their email address by bjourne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The problem is that importing Facebook "friends" to gmail requires you to get access to their email address. Friends are in quotes, because Facebook friendship is more like shallow aquantances than friendship. Most of those people you don't want to share your email address with. It is a different thing entirely when people voluntarily give out their email addresses by signing up for Facebook apps, but in this case the email sharing would happen involuntarily.

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    Football Odds
    1. Re:You can't have their email address by Rockoon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Very few people have my email address because I dont want them "inviting" me to sites, because for most sites that is exactly equivalent to them ordering viagra and penis enlargement emails for me.

      I dont give a crap if general acquaintances know who I am dating, or what movie we saw last night. I do give a crap how many spam emails I get.

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      "His name was James Damore."
    2. Re:You can't have their email address by bemymonkey · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Is that really relevant to end users? I don't think it's a necessary distinction, and is more of an annoyance in that users are baffled when the "synced" addresses don't show up in their Google contacts on the web...

    3. Re:You can't have their email address by tjhart85 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Exactly! I had to do the same. If you want to send an email to someone thats a facebook friend, you've got to look them up and it's a PITA (compared to just sending them an email).

      Personally, I'd much prefer Google having access to everyone I know than Facebook. It just sucks that Buzz sucks so horribly that it never really took off.

    4. Re:You can't have their email address by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Exactly like I get an "invite" from Facebook every time someone with my email address in their contacts allows fB to parse their address book? I opt out every time but it happens a couple times a year anyway. And what really pisses me off is at the bottom of each invite is a list of all the other fB users that I "might know"... based on fB finding my address in an imported contact list for each of them... now, I don't have an fB account so why are they correlating people that have my email address on an ongoing basis? Once they have sent out invites, why is fB keeping the information from the imported contacts? And how do I get them to delete (i.e. not retain) my email address when I'm not a member...

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      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
  2. well done, google by zanderredux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    awesome. fuck facebook for not giving the option to export contact lists with useful information. I had to pull a list of e-mails from facebook and I ended up going page by page and copying the e-mails by hand. facebook wants to hold all e-mails within it's walled garden and doesn't reciprocate...

  3. Data walls... by kent_eh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    but will this just lead to more sites putting up 'data walls?'"

    And that's a bad thing why?
    Is it a good thing that one site can "one click" harvest large amounts of information about a person, and all the people they have ever met online?
    That doesn't sound very "opt-in" to me.

    For instance: if I'm one of the people in someone else's "collected addresses" address book (say, someone I bought something from on E-bay 2 years ago, and they didn't even realise my e-mail was automatically saved in their address book).

    I don't want Facebook Et al. having easy access thank you.

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    "I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
    1. Re:Data walls... by techjoe · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It is really easy to tie people together and how they've come to be connected once you have such a large dataset to work from. I cannot stand the automatic address booking of addresses itself but that's just one small cog in this run-away train's gearbox..

  4. Re:other sites by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    and let's not forget youtube.

    A quick google search would have found: http://www.dataliberation.org/google/youtube-1 .

  5. Closed by icebraining · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Facebook promotes all this semantic tagging of the web, trying to convince webmasters to use their (broken) RDFa standard OpenGraph so they can parse and extract all the info from other websites, yet they don't implement anything like it themselves. They're an information black hole, and other websites should be so willing to just give everything up without any reciprocity.

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    Dilbert RSS feed
  6. Lead to Walls? That's FUD! by Zamphatta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Facebook wants to take without sharing. If it were a 5 year old kid, they're be forced to share or quit playing with the other kids. It's that simple. Google is actually moving to create an atmosphere of sharing data easily if the user wants to. Facebook's the one with the wall already, and Google's singing Pink Floyd, "tear down the wall!" and I've read multiple stories in the news this week about how this is a bad thing. Can you say FUD?

  7. Friends Don't Let Friends FB or GMail or ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Let's consider a few things
    a) you don't want spam
    b) you don't want your email address being used to identify you **anywhere** that you do not specifically allow.

    Question 1:
      - Why would you email anyone with a gmail account?

    Question 2:
      - Why would you want anyone to enter your email address into facebook (or any other "social media app/website" at all?

    When I provide you with my email, it is for your personal use, not the use of google, or facebook or LinkedIn or whatever other ad-based tool you use because you are too lazy to care.

    Go away.

  8. Fake suggestions from facebook... by js_sebastian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Facebook is so keen on having us use this feature so they get all of our email contacts as well, that it frequently show "suggestions" on the right hand side telling you that some of your friends have used the facebook friend finder feature... and the best thing is that in several cases it is an outright lie! I have asked my contacts if they had really used that, and several told me they had not, including a few security geeks who I trust are telling the truth (you know, people with papers published on social networks privacy flaws).

  9. Re:NEVER let spammers know the address is legit. by tokul · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because the e-mails that social network sites send are not unsolicited

    It is not up to email sender to decide whether his/her email is solicited. Email receiver never asked to bombard him/her with invites to some shady social network site.