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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

The NYT article says that Facebook told them that some partners stored that data on their servers. Do you have a good citation that this does not refer to these device integrations, given you so strongly claim it doesn't? (It's very well possible that it's a misleading quote by the NYT, or a misunderstanding, but I don't see a clear answer in any of what we know) That's from my perspective the critical point here.

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No I do not. I do know that the Windows Phone version communicated directly with Facebook due to network traces I had done back then. It did not use an intermediary. I could see some devices using an intermediary, especially for under powered and "dumb" phones where they may have made a simplified web app that would be usable on their platforms where as the actual Facebook web app would not have been. Think flip phones that had Facebook integration.

I don't know if that happened or not, but the way this article reads is very misleading and several of the vendors that they listed did not actually have access to the data.

Surely that applies to every API in existence, for example, on the HTTP API I'm using right now to post this comment, I know that Mozilla stores some of my data on their servers (through FF Sync), and HN know that's possible, but it's not up to HN to ensure Mozilla aren't taking that data and selling it elsewhere.

HN didn't design the commenting API specifically for FF Sync to use though.

On Windows Phone 7, Facebook integrated with the Contacts app, so your Facebook friends would be added to your contacts, and their images would be added to their contacts if they didn't have one set. That's probably what it is, as that would then sync with your Outlook account for those contacts

It sounded like a number of devices provided contact syncing with Facebook as well as the ability to backup your contacts and data to the device manufacturer servers. Now, they might have been storing other data that they shouldn't have, but backing up synced FB contacts by itself seems pretty tame.

I personally setup FB to do contact syncing with my Google contacts so I could get the FB profile pictures for all of my contacts. Does that count as Google improperly using FB user data? I don't think so.

If you sign in to facebook in Opera mini, opera will store your facebook data on their servers. How much does that upset you?

Sounds like closed source software to me.

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