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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.

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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.

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