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

[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

[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

[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...

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.

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.

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?