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Comment by mikebo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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