Google Challenges Facebook Over User Address Books 120
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?'"
About time (Score:1, Insightful)
About time for someone to challange Facebook
You can't have their email address (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, but you could "invite" them?
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:5, Informative)
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Anybody who has your email address can give it to Facebook or some e-card place, or any other sketchy place that may send you unsolicited email. Anybody who has your real address can sign you up for dozens of magazine subscriptions or order pizza delivered to your place.
As soon as the information is out there, you've lost control over it. It's not nice, it's not good, but that's the way it is.
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Well, that kind of sucks, doesn't it? Both my real name and online alias match a whole lot of people. There are regular folks, and some well respected folks (doctors, scientists, and talented artists). Even cities that I've lived in had multiple people with my names. With a common name, I'm less likely to get the random stalker or other undesirables. I've known people with more unique names, and a few misplaced words online will get the undesirables crawling out of the woodwork.
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Oh yes we do, your on slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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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?
With that many computers, it's certainly not cold.
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With that many computers, it's certainly not cold.
I only need a single desktop with a Pentium4 and a GeForce card
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Not me. I was watching the newest/latest episodes of Smallville and Clone Wars, surfing the Internet, reading the newsgroups, etc. at my mom's place underground (I am an ant, remember? :P). However, being single part is true for me as a nerd/geek.
P.S. You're != your. :P
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Or is that just me?
Nah, it probably wasn't just you who cried yourself to sleep in his cold lonely apartment... ;-)
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Many people have my email address, very few of them know who I am dating or what I did last night.
If you were that worried about people knowing who you are dating or what you did last night, why would you post it on Facebook to start with?
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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.
I think you don't understand the issue here. "Most people" seeing whatever information you deem to make public or semi-private is a lot different than a corporation, without your permission, obtaining and keeping and selling and using your personal contact information (ie: email address). Heck, that info isn't even displayed on one's info page on Facebook if they dont want.
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Ok, but many people do have their email address displayed on facebook. You can have your email addresses displayed to friends/networks.
Why not allow the exporting of those email addresses that can be seen by that user?
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:5, Insightful)
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 have their email address (Score:3, Informative)
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*.
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You don't need to have an email address to have a google contact, if you don't have any contact details then what's the point in importing them.
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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.
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It doesn't. As you point out yourself:
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
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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...
Re:You can't have their email address (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
obviously it depends on who you friend (Score:2, Flamebait)
Friends are in quotes, because Facebook friendship is more like shallow aquantances than friendship.
Uh, maybe for you? The only people I'm friends with on Facebook are people I know pretty well- people I've met, intend to meet again, and either am good friends with, or intend to get to be better friends. I've declined a number of friend requests from people I barely knew. And since I've looked at my friend's profiles on a regular basis, I can see all their email addresses. A number of them also have p
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The problem is that importing Facebook "friends" to gmail requires you to get access to their email address.
Some people make their contact information available to their friends, and most don't. Currently, Facebook doesn't make it easy to extract even that smaller subset of information. It would be great if they started doing that.
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The problem is that importing Facebook "friends" to gmail requires you to get access to their email address.
No, the problem is that facebook hasn't allowed data portability so that whatever contact info your "friends" do share hasn't been available by 3rd parties (like Google).
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The problem is that for people who HAVE shared their email address with you on FB, there is no good way to synchronize that data to another address book.
Facebook invites ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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And you validate that the address facebook now has on record is real, legit, and interested in privacy.
If you ignore, filter, and/or delete the message, they really can't confirm.
Just follow the same procedure you use for SPAM/UCE
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That is assuming you are signed up for facebook. Given his stance on the issue, I think it's safe to say that mystik does not use facebook.
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Yep, part of the import address book feature is to invite every person in your address book to be your friend whether they are on facebook or not.
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We're going O/T here --- but Facebook will send email invites to email addresses that you don't have registered on Facebook, if the user (who stupidly gives Facebook their Email account username & password) elects.
I've received real (rather than spam/phishing) Facebook 'join us' messages @ my work email address, even though my work address has gone no where near my personal Facebook account.
NEVER let spammers know the address is legit. (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Gmail has filters based on the sender address, you know...
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Push a button, mark it as spam, and let the Bayesian filters take care of it. Your spam is obviously not my spam.
well done, google (Score:5, Interesting)
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fuck facebook.
FTFY
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other sites (Score:2)
I think it would be fair that most community-built sites lower their data walls. Not just facebook, but also, e.g., Amazon, and IMdb, which have huge collections of user-reviews, and let's not forget youtube.
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and let's not forget youtube.
A quick google search would have found: http://www.dataliberation.org/google/youtube-1 .
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YouTube export: http://www.dataliberation.org/google/youtube-1 [dataliberation.org]
You can download videos one at a time, and there's an issue you can vote up for bulk download. Of course, youtube videos are usually lower quality than the original you uploaded.
Comments cannot be exported, but I think that is a feature to aid in the preservation of human culture.
Data walls... (Score:3, Interesting)
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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If Google gets their way, you can directly import all of your Facebook contacts (or just the ones you want) and be able to add additional information with the Facebook info as a starting point.
This is something that I would very much like.
Reciprocity (Score:1)
I'm not sure if that's a good thing, or not. I tend to favor it most of the time.
Closed (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.
Lead to Walls? That's FUD! (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:Lead to Walls? (Score:1)
regardless of your stretch of a definition for fud,
Google is singing "tear down the wall," by building a wall. we've been living in an environment of corporate self-protection lately; do you think this tactic will work, and convince Facebook "Oh, wow, I should open up here!"
Or is it more likely that other sites will follow suit and prevent their users from easily getting in bed with other websites?
Re:Lead to Walls? That's FUD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Skip (Score:1)
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It's significantly easier than harvesting the data from Facebook yourself (I've done it and it takes forever!)
Facebook NOW has a find friends feature. It takes the contacts in your address book and tries to find matches using their name/email address. How is this a bad thing? It makes it easier for you and you get to choose the people from that list that you want to friend without
Prisoner's dilemma (Score:1, Insightful)
Isn't this basically the Prisoner's dilemma? Both Google and Facebook stand to gain by allowing users to share their hundreds of millions of contacts. It may be a slanted version of the prisoner's dilemma since Facebook has nearly twice as many as Google, but Facebook still probably stands to gain millions of users per year from Google and they are not in direct competition with one another, since a lot of people use both Facebook and Google.
Turning the other cheek is typically a bad thing to do in these si
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I'd say it's more of a stag hunt.
Both sides' preferences can be ranked as follows: 1-way flow of info in their favor > 2-way flow of info > 1-way flow against / no flow
Knowing this, either party will try to make this exchange as one-way as possible, and both sides always have an incentive to switch strategies. The only way to break this is to have complete, perfect information along with the proper trust along with some sort of deterrent... So Facebook has to know that Google can and will hurt them
Possibly (Score:1)
Friends Don't Let Friends FB or GMail or ... (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
Glass houses (Score:4, Informative)
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).
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Google's argument isn't about interop at all. It's about how easy it is to pack up all your data and leave a service for another.
How about this then:
"We hope that reciprocity will be an important step towards creating a world of true data liberation" [emphasis mine]
Is there some reason that reciprocity should stop with "data liberation"? The Internet is all about interoperation, yet Google only wants to take by sucking users in to its own OpenID accounts and refusing to recognize others.
This is the same greedy, corporate, asshole behavior that they accuse Facebook of, just in a slightly different arena.
I'll give up Facebook before I give up GMail. (Score:1)
I'll give up Facebook before I give up GMail.
Facebook is a facehugger (Score:1)
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I think anyone out there who has Half Life'd will understand.
What about those of us who have only seen "Alien"? (That's an old movie, BTW.)
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Dad? Is that you? I knew you had gotten a Facebook account with your iPhone but I had no idea you'd be on Slashdot too!
Fake suggestions from facebook... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fake suggestions from facebook... (Score:4, Informative)
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".
Possible Facebook database leak (Score:1)
My 2 bits (Score:2)
The only good corporations and businesses are those terrified of their customers, the minute the corps think they have the upper hand you get something like AT&T, horrible service, over priced, poorly managed and you have to sign their contract which they can change at any time.
It's all about negotiation (Score:2)
In the end, they'll agree to share information. Odds are, Google is going to have to pay Facebook or give them a cut of ad revenue from ads targeted using the social networking information gained from Facebook. Can't say I have a problem with Facebook wanting cash, assuming that's part of the issue - they have information Google wants, Google ought to pay for the privilege. They already make enough money off serving ads while indexing other people's websites. At least the Facebook users know they're posting
will this lead to more sites putting up data walls (Score:2)
Yes, because there's nothing starting an initiative of mutually beneficial and required openness to isolate projects and to put up walls.
That's the reason why the GPL failed to ever gain traction, you know?
Good for them.... (Score:1)
Google was making it easy for developers of other companies like facebook to import the gmail info, and not getting the same kindness in return, good for them, they should also change up the format so all the info in the past given out, would need to be revalidated thereby forcing all companies who want to import the gmail info to renew that trust and offer their code / help also for importing contacts etc...
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Not true. André gives me very different results from Andre.
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All search engines suck right now. Most of the time you get nothing but spam. Especially when looking for drivers, and especially XP drivers.
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Windows XP sucks for not including a proper driver distribution system.
But yeah, search engines suck too. Showing results from 2006 when the user is clearly searching for technology information is not particularly clever. And it's not just tech searches. Google's supposedly clever system has still not noticed that I click the "show results from last year" option in about 95% of my searches. You'd think it would enable stuff by default after a while for logged-in users.