Some points that are getting lost in the discussion below. I work at Facebook.
1. Facebook lets you export your data. It has been possible to do so ever since the graph API debuted in April '10. Since the market wasn't filling the gap, we even built a "download your information" product (https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php -> Download Your Information). It gives you a zip file with all your contact info, photos, video, status updates, wall posts, etc. If somebody would like to write an importer for Diaspora, or Google Me, or even a non-vaporware competitor, they are well within Facebook's ToS, imho.
2. Facebook allows other sites programmatic access to the social graph. Yes, the supposed "crown jewels." That's exactly what Facebook Connect is for. You can see it in the wild on Pandora, Netflix, Yelp, Quora, and literally millions of other websites that are already doing what Google claims it wants to do: identify your Facebook friends.
3. Most importantly, what Google is insisting on is completely insane.
The ability to export my friends' email sounds good, but as with so many social product ideas (e.g., themed backgrounds for profiles), it stops sounding so good when you realize everybody has the same power. Think of it instead as: all of your Facebook friends can export your email to anybody who writes a Facebook app. Those spam quizzes? Every farm simulation knock-off flash game? The day Facebook does this, every Facebook user will wake up with their inbox crammed solid with spam from random Facebook applications that they do not even use.
What Google has not explained is why they need friends' email addresses, per se. Why couldn't whatever message they want to transmit be transmitted via Facebook messages, or wall posts, which send email notifications to almost all users anyway, and are already available via third-party APIs? This entire "not open enough!" straw man is a set of moving goalposts that Google will use to justify whatever competitive maneuvering they find convenient.
Facebook is in the right here, people. The product decision Google is asking Facebook to take would be a disaster for Facebook users. Meanwhile, the lever Google is using to attack Facebook comes entirely at the expense of GMail's users, who before this episode were voting with their feet by the millions to import their contact data to Facebook, and no longer have that option. Google is making its users' lives worse, in an attempt to make Facebook make its users lives worse.
1) FB only recently added this export data ability - before then, all they did was consume and never gave back. They are lucky no one called them out before.
2) You do want to export friends' emails because they are my friends and I should be able to maintain their emails regardless. I want to leave facebook, export the data, and import it elsewhere. It's fine that they are refusing to give an API for it (although they can make the application request for permission for it first) but if I am exporting all my data into a zip file, I expect that information to be there. I am sure Google wouldn't be complaining if FB did just this. If a user is stupid enough to import all their contact info back into a random FB application manually and gets spammed, then let them be.
3) Stop spinning this like Google is making their users' lives worse. Google allows this and FB doesn't because FB wants to trap all their information inside of their ecosystem. They are not right. They are one of the worse companies that try to spin automatic opt-in (confuse users and hope they never opt-out) to make them release more information.
4) Explain to me why FB blocking Twitter, blocking iTunes, blocking Google is GOOD for any of their users.
A quibble about the "download your information" feature:
This is not data export. It's a nice offline look at some of the data I have on facebook, but not all the dt I've added, nor complete data of what it claims to have.
The archive of messages does not contain all the messages that are in my inbox, let alone the deleted ones that should be produced. Not enough information about profile changes, picture changes, etc. is included.
An export of data from facebook should include information on all interactions interact with anyone on facebook. That's the information I put in, that's what I expect out.
What you do have is a token effort to appease the people who don't really care, but are scared into demanding it by their friends who do care. It doesn't solve our problem, only yours.
If you agree it's wrong to allow a friend to export my e-mail address, why should Google allow it either? It seems like Facebook wants to have its cake and eat it too.
You added your friends email addresses in your Gmail address book. On Facebook, your friends put in their own email addresses into their profile and set the privacy settings around it. It is a subtle but important difference.
My point is that data portability should be transitive. If by manually entering a friend's email address I 'own' that data, and it is thus valid for me to export, any service that imports that data should also allow exporting it. Otherwise it's lossy if I want to move on to another service.
In the FB case it's perfectly reasonable to prevent me from exporting data that I didn't provide, especially if another user provided it and has set privacy controls around it.
They are different services. Facebook is a third-party platform in a way that GMail has never been. If your email address becomes your friends' Facebook data, your email address will be distributed to many companies that you have no direct relationship with. Who knows what those companies will choose to do with it; we choose not to find out.
GMail simply does not have this problem: there are essentially no "GMail apps", and users realize that their email addresses are exposed to their contacts when they use the service. There are no fly-by-night "GMail games" that will sell anything they can get their hands on to RapLeaf. This has its ups and downs, but one of its consequences is that "transitive trust" must have its limits.
Google is specifically demanding an API, and further making demands about performance, uptime, availability, etc. of the API. They're being perfectly clear that exporting the emails to .csv file that then gets uploaded is unacceptable.
And again, it's their service, and their servers, and I'm libertarian enough to say that they should be free to do what they want with them. However, I'm also free to question their "Love is Hate, War is Peace, Closed is Open" syllogism with respect to Facebook, and I find it preposterous.
Google is, imho, perfectly within its rights to provide an email service that doesn't allow you to download your contacts easily, or doesn't allow it for certain services, or whatever. What I don't appreciate is the hypocritical Monday-morning-quarterbacking of how a very different service chooses to protect its users data.
All Google is saying is if you don't allow us to do it, we won't allow you. So if FB wants to "protect its users data" then they should too. End of story. They didn't really do anything more other than news sites picking up the story and running headlines with it.
>It gives you a zip file with all your contact info, photos, video, status updates, wall posts, etc. If somebody would like to write an importer for Diaspora, or Google Me, or even a non-vaporware competitor, they are well within Facebook's ToS, imho.
If I'm trying to write an importer for this Facebook data, how can I differentiate John Smith (my friend) from the thousand other John Smiths? It's easy to do if I have John's email.
>3. Most importantly, what Google is insisting on is completely insane.
Facebook can figure out who people know. They don't need to use facebook. Their friends' contact list is enough to construct a semblance of their social circle.
So the repercussions isn't limited to that person. They are implicating their friends' privacy (no matter how minor) to the very anti-consumer-privacy fronted company Facebook.
> The ability to export my friends' email sounds good, but as with so many social product ideas (e.g., themed backgrounds for profiles), it stops sounding so good when you realize everybody has the same power.
Then why does Facebook allow this very feature to yahoo mail users??
Comments
Some points that are getting lost in the discussion below. I work at Facebook.
1. Facebook lets you export your data. It has been possible to do so ever since the graph API debuted in April '10. Since the market wasn't filling the gap, we even built a "download your information" product (https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php -> Download Your Information). It gives you a zip file with all your contact info, photos, video, status updates, wall posts, etc. If somebody would like to write an importer for Diaspora, or Google Me, or even a non-vaporware competitor, they are well within Facebook's ToS, imho.
2. Facebook allows other sites programmatic access to the social graph. Yes, the supposed "crown jewels." That's exactly what Facebook Connect is for. You can see it in the wild on Pandora, Netflix, Yelp, Quora, and literally millions of other websites that are already doing what Google claims it wants to do: identify your Facebook friends.
3. Most importantly, what Google is insisting on is completely insane.
The ability to export my friends' email sounds good, but as with so many social product ideas (e.g., themed backgrounds for profiles), it stops sounding so good when you realize everybody has the same power. Think of it instead as: all of your Facebook friends can export your email to anybody who writes a Facebook app. Those spam quizzes? Every farm simulation knock-off flash game? The day Facebook does this, every Facebook user will wake up with their inbox crammed solid with spam from random Facebook applications that they do not even use.
What Google has not explained is why they need friends' email addresses, per se. Why couldn't whatever message they want to transmit be transmitted via Facebook messages, or wall posts, which send email notifications to almost all users anyway, and are already available via third-party APIs? This entire "not open enough!" straw man is a set of moving goalposts that Google will use to justify whatever competitive maneuvering they find convenient.
Facebook is in the right here, people. The product decision Google is asking Facebook to take would be a disaster for Facebook users. Meanwhile, the lever Google is using to attack Facebook comes entirely at the expense of GMail's users, who before this episode were voting with their feet by the millions to import their contact data to Facebook, and no longer have that option. Google is making its users' lives worse, in an attempt to make Facebook make its users lives worse.
1) FB only recently added this export data ability - before then, all they did was consume and never gave back. They are lucky no one called them out before.
2) You do want to export friends' emails because they are my friends and I should be able to maintain their emails regardless. I want to leave facebook, export the data, and import it elsewhere. It's fine that they are refusing to give an API for it (although they can make the application request for permission for it first) but if I am exporting all my data into a zip file, I expect that information to be there. I am sure Google wouldn't be complaining if FB did just this. If a user is stupid enough to import all their contact info back into a random FB application manually and gets spammed, then let them be.
3) Stop spinning this like Google is making their users' lives worse. Google allows this and FB doesn't because FB wants to trap all their information inside of their ecosystem. They are not right. They are one of the worse companies that try to spin automatic opt-in (confuse users and hope they never opt-out) to make them release more information.
4) Explain to me why FB blocking Twitter, blocking iTunes, blocking Google is GOOD for any of their users.
A quibble about the "download your information" feature:
This is not data export. It's a nice offline look at some of the data I have on facebook, but not all the dt I've added, nor complete data of what it claims to have.
The archive of messages does not contain all the messages that are in my inbox, let alone the deleted ones that should be produced. Not enough information about profile changes, picture changes, etc. is included.
An export of data from facebook should include information on all interactions interact with anyone on facebook. That's the information I put in, that's what I expect out.
What you do have is a token effort to appease the people who don't really care, but are scared into demanding it by their friends who do care. It doesn't solve our problem, only yours.
If you agree it's wrong to allow a friend to export my e-mail address, why should Google allow it either? It seems like Facebook wants to have its cake and eat it too.
You added your friends email addresses in your Gmail address book. On Facebook, your friends put in their own email addresses into their profile and set the privacy settings around it. It is a subtle but important difference.
Fair point. Once I've imported my gmail contacts into Facebook though, I then should be able to import them out of Facebook by that logic?
Why can't you just get them from Gmail?
My point is that data portability should be transitive. If by manually entering a friend's email address I 'own' that data, and it is thus valid for me to export, any service that imports that data should also allow exporting it. Otherwise it's lossy if I want to move on to another service.
In the FB case it's perfectly reasonable to prevent me from exporting data that I didn't provide, especially if another user provided it and has set privacy controls around it.
They are different services. Facebook is a third-party platform in a way that GMail has never been. If your email address becomes your friends' Facebook data, your email address will be distributed to many companies that you have no direct relationship with. Who knows what those companies will choose to do with it; we choose not to find out.
GMail simply does not have this problem: there are essentially no "GMail apps", and users realize that their email addresses are exposed to their contacts when they use the service. There are no fly-by-night "GMail games" that will sell anything they can get their hands on to RapLeaf. This has its ups and downs, but one of its consequences is that "transitive trust" must have its limits.
Isn't there a distinction between letting a single user export the emails of his/her friends and having an API method for this?
Google is specifically demanding an API, and further making demands about performance, uptime, availability, etc. of the API. They're being perfectly clear that exporting the emails to .csv file that then gets uploaded is unacceptable.
And again, it's their service, and their servers, and I'm libertarian enough to say that they should be free to do what they want with them. However, I'm also free to question their "Love is Hate, War is Peace, Closed is Open" syllogism with respect to Facebook, and I find it preposterous.
Google is, imho, perfectly within its rights to provide an email service that doesn't allow you to download your contacts easily, or doesn't allow it for certain services, or whatever. What I don't appreciate is the hypocritical Monday-morning-quarterbacking of how a very different service chooses to protect its users data.
All Google is saying is if you don't allow us to do it, we won't allow you. So if FB wants to "protect its users data" then they should too. End of story. They didn't really do anything more other than news sites picking up the story and running headlines with it.
>It gives you a zip file with all your contact info, photos, video, status updates, wall posts, etc. If somebody would like to write an importer for Diaspora, or Google Me, or even a non-vaporware competitor, they are well within Facebook's ToS, imho.
If I'm trying to write an importer for this Facebook data, how can I differentiate John Smith (my friend) from the thousand other John Smiths? It's easy to do if I have John's email.
UID
>3. Most importantly, what Google is insisting on is completely insane.
Facebook can figure out who people know. They don't need to use facebook. Their friends' contact list is enough to construct a semblance of their social circle.
So the repercussions isn't limited to that person. They are implicating their friends' privacy (no matter how minor) to the very anti-consumer-privacy fronted company Facebook.
> The ability to export my friends' email sounds good, but as with so many social product ideas (e.g., themed backgrounds for profiles), it stops sounding so good when you realize everybody has the same power.
Then why does Facebook allow this very feature to yahoo mail users??