Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books

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?'"

Comments

You can't have their email address

[bjourne]

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.

Re:You can't have their email address

[Partaolas]

So most people don't mind sharing personal information with these "friends", but when it comes to sharing their email is where they draw the line? I would think it would be the reverse. Many people have my email address, very few of them know who I am dating or what I did last night.

Re:You can't have their email address

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people have my email address, very few of them know who I am dating or what I did last night.

True, they may not know what you did last night. But given you're a Slashdot user, they most certainly know what you did not do last night.

Re:You can't have their email address

[contrapunctus]

use another email for facebook so your real email remains clean while you're at it, run facebook in a separate browser (that is only for facebook) so they can't track all your activities and link them to your account (or other websites knowing who you are from your facebook cookies (or some other way they use to track you)).

Re:You can't have their email address

[hsmith]

You are totally missing the point. If your brother has your email address and uses GMail. He logs into Facebook and does the "Find people I know using Google Mail" - Facebook then has your address.

Re:You can't have their email address

[egladil]

Actually, I am the only one in the world with my name. But even if you've got a common name your brother probably doesn't have that many friends with your name so it's trivial for facebook to make the connection between your brothers gmail contact with your name and your brothers facebook friend with the same name.

Re:You can't have their email address

[Z_A_Commando]

Back in the day (2004-2006), when Facebook was only for college students, email addresses on Facebook used to be mailto: links. Since crossing the collegiate network boundaries was more difficult than it is now (Facebook hadn't eroded basic privacy that far yet), having a person's email was a surefire way to make sure you found who you were looking for.

Once Facebook opened up to non-college students, I believe emails displayed on Facebook actually became images to harden them from harvesting by spam bots. This was before "granular" privacy controls, and so anyone who was your "friend" on Facebook could see your basic information, of which your email was a part.

Once Facebook was forced to introduce stricter/"easier" privacy controls, a user could restrict, on an per-individual basis, who could see their email(s). As a result, emails became text.

In regards to allowing exporting other users' information, I think Facebook would face a huge backlash from users and "game" developers, for different, though obvious reasons. However, the biggest reason this won't happen is because Facebook's goal is to hoard users' information by providing low barriers to entry and high barriers to exit.

Re:You can't have their email address

[metamatic]

Yes, it's relevant to end users, because (a) it means the contact details don't show up in Google contacts, as you point out; (b) you can't access the information from any other Android app that does address book lookups; (c) if Facebook changes its mind about its app or your friend changes privacy settings, the contact information disappears; (d) the information won't sync with your desktop computer. I basically had to go through my Facebook friends and copy their contact information into the actual address book in order to be able to do stuff like send them SMS messages.

Re:You can't have their email address

[FatdogHaiku]

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...

Facebook invites ?

[frodo from middle ea]

Good , now also block those annoying facebook invite emails and I'm a happy camper

well done, google

[zanderredux]

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...

NEVER let spammers know the address is legit.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good practice to never "opt-out" for other spam, since it indicates that the address is indeed valid and used. So why should Facebook or any other social media site be treated any differently?

Re:NEVER let spammers know the address is legit.

[Rob Kaper]

Because the e-mails that social network sites send are not unsolicited but sent by request from and on behalf of a real person who already has and has verified your e-mail address.

Re:NEVER let spammers know the address is legit.

[tokul]

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.

Closed

[icebraining]

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.

Lead to Walls? That's FUD!

[Zamphatta]

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?

Re:Lead to Walls? That's FUD!

[Nerdfest]

I've recently been trying to ensure that I have actual email addresses for people, as lately it seems that I end up doing most of my communication with people over FaceBook. This is not currently a bad thing, but could end up like the situation where you have an email address with your ISP and you can't dump them because this is how everyone contacts you ... and you end up being tied to a service you don't want. Years ago I extricated myself from that trap by getting my own domain. FaceBook is the next iteration of that problem ... many of us are tying too much functionality into something where it is difficult to choose an alternative.

Glass houses

[Raenex]

Does Google accept OpenID from all providers yet? For years now, they have provided you with an OpenID, but didn't accept an OpenID from 3rd parties. They are just now starting to allow certain providers in (big ones like Yahoo).

Oh yes we do, your on slashdot

[SmallFurryCreature]

Oh yes we do, your on slashdot:

So, you ain't dating anybody, and you spend last night re-compiling the kernel, then crying yourself to sleep in your cold lonely apartment. Only comforted by the hum of your computers.

Or is that just me?

Re:Fake suggestions from facebook...

[wirelessbuzzers]

From what I've heard, it's a quarter-truth rather than an outright lie. If Alice finds Bob using friend finder, then this message can appear with Bob's name on it. Because there's no way to tell if a friend request came from friend finder, Bob doesn't know that he's "found friends using friend finder".