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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?'"

4 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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    1. 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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  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. 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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