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?'"

Re:Facebook invites ?

[k2enemy]

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

You can click a link at the bottom of the invite to stop receiving them. If it bothers you that much, this seems like a pretty "low cost" way of eliminating the problem.

Re:You CAN have their email address

[buchner.johannes]

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.

The email address is already visible in the info tab of the profile. This discussion is solely about whether a user can export all friends email addresses (that he can already see) *automatically*.

Re:Facebook search sucks

[icebraining]

Google search sucks too for special characters ][/;:@#%éçà*, etc

Not true. André gives me very different results from Andre.

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

[Paradise Pete]

That part where he says you're totally missing the point? Well you're totally missing the point. They got your real email address when your brother searched for people in his contact list.

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

[bemymonkey]

So how come the official Android Facebook app imports all Facebook contacts' E-Mail addresses directly into the Android contacts database?

Sure, it's not a permanent sync/merge (the addresses are removed if you uninstall the Facebook app), but it doesn't seem that Facebook is overly concerned with keeping contacts' E-Mail addresses private.

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).

Re:You can't have their email address

[metamatic]

So how come the official Android Facebook app imports all Facebook contacts' E-Mail addresses directly into the Android contacts database?

It doesn't. As you point out yourself:

Sure, it's not a permanent sync/merge (the addresses are removed if you uninstall the Facebook app) ...

The Facebook app keeps the contact data in its own separate database, and patches into the contacts app to show it alongside the Android contact database data. The Facebook data is never added to the Android contact database. You can verify this by attempting to read it using the contacts API, or noting that it doesn't sync with Gmail Contacts.

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".