Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

The theory is that by accepting someone's friend request you're not automatically granting them the ability to export your email address to any application that asks for it. If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. I know of no social network, including Google's own Orkut, Twitter, and Myspace, which allows this kind of mass exportation of friend emails via its API.

A slightly different way to look at it is "I share some of my contact info with you as long as I can control how you use it (e.g. look but don't re-share, I can revoke it later, etc.)." Facebook allows that kind of control by preventing data export.

Hey, a failure to respect privacy is just direct evidence of openness, right?

(Disclaimer. I may be biased by working for Google. But I'm also not opposed to switching from a BSD to GPL strategy to encourage freedom.)

He is talking out of both sides of his mouth though.

If Facebook exports a list of friends, what do you get? A list of names with no links? That isn't really useful. You either need email addresses or Facebook profile URLs to actually make a graph. What if your list is Billy Bob, Joe Smith, John Doe, and Mike Collins. How many of those are there are facebook? Dozens? Hundreds? It is meaningless.

If Facebook exports a list of all of the friends' Facebook profile URLs, that is a step in the right direction.

Sure, why not.

> Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends.

1) People are automatically added to my address book as soon as they email me. Maybe not my "personal" address book or whatever, but their address has been recorded regardless. This is not something I have to maintain, it happens as soon as you contact me.

2) If I change my primary email address I need to send out a blast mail to everyone who I might care to have my new address. A pain in the ass. I'd much prefer to have contact information pushed to me through, say, existing networks.

I honestly don't see a difference. I look at my address book as a "friends list" as well - just an annoying one that I need to keep up to date, instead of allowing my contacts to update as they need to. And if someone doesn't want me to have their contact information, why would we be friends in the first place? (I suppose you could fence off access to a select group, but really)

Facebook is being completely two-faced about this. They're obfuscating the situation by turning this into a matter of "Google-owns-mail," whereas "Facebook-owns-contacts". In other words, Facebook's stance is that users own contacts in Facebook, meanwhile users own email addresses in Gmail. The truth is: all this really boils down to is email addresses and nothing else. If you said, "No duh!" to that last sentence and you're still siding with Facebook, re-read that last sentence again and think about it. Let me explain.

According to Facebook: Facebook can get email addresses from Google, but Google cannot get email addresses from Facebook.

Huh, does this sound fair?

I see the gears in your are head turning, stop thinking about this as a matter of "Gmail users own email" vs "Facebook users own contact lists."

That Facebook argument is fallacious because it's a lot like saying, "If Google were to deal drugs, it'd be okay for Facebook to acquire said drugs from Google. On the other hand, it would be oh-so-bad for society if Facebook were to sell drugs, when they're actually in the matchmaking business." Whether or not it's morally reprehensible to distribute drugs, at least one's stance on the matter should be consistent. Don't insult a user's intelligence by turning this into a matter of business and occupation, which is what they're doing. This is a matter of email-contacts between parties A and B, and nothing more.

I don't think Google is as open as they COULD be, but they have a long history of doing a helluva lot better job than Facebook.

As I said to you earlier, why can't I, the user, download whatever data my friends make available to me, subject to whatever privacy controls the data is already under and (perhaps) to load restrictions or resource availability?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887085

And this is the important point, I could do the same thing manually by visiting my friends' pages. So this is all about convenience for the customer, not about some crusading policy position.

If my friends don't want me to "mass export" "private" email addresses, they shouldn't leave them out where I can cut and paste them (and sell to 419 scammers, if I were the vengeful type). The same argument applies to all my friends' data.

That is a really fine line they are drawing there. You have access to the same information on both services and you acquire it in essentially the same way i.e. by the other party volunteering it. Facebook is effectively asserting that their users rely on the fine details of how the service works to maintain their privacy, even though Facebook has never had much regard for that principle themselves.

He is right about the "when it's convenient" thing though. If you want to adhere to a moral standard then great, do it, consistently. What other parties do is irrelevant.

And corporations morally crusading against each other is a complete joke. Corporations will slit your throat for a nickel. My stomach is not looking forward to the "who's less evil" war Google has started.

> Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But a list of friends is useless without their emails or at least, their facebook ID which the dump doesn't give. Why can't you give a hash version of their friend's email?

Also, if I'm able to import emails from gmail or yahoo into facebook, I should be at least allowed to export those friends emails as it is proven that I already have them! If you allow users to import emails but you don't allow them to export those same emails, I'm sorry but that means Facebook is a closed silo.

Here's my problem: Since when is my email address your information? Why is it okay for you to hand it over to a complete stranger, just so you can play Farmville? I understand that there's always a risk that my email address might become public, but when the recipient is responsible, it's a violation of trust.

Yes, let engage with this position. I claim it's conniving double-talk: "Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists."

Hmm, so the (arguable) implication first is that an email address are more personal than a friend-name. They're more like photos, somehow. So sharing these is a more personal thing than just sharing the name of a friend. But then, email program should still export email addresses? (why, 'cause it's an "email program"!) I suppose then, a photo sharing program should allow you to export your friends' photos where-ever too??

The whole idea of what's appropriate to share is ill-defined and nebulous but this particular effort to draw a line is just a hoot... "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"

I'm trying to find a way to figure out how this line of reasoning wouldn't also apply to arguing that facebook shouldn't exist at all, and I'm not having much luck.

A friend won't care that you have their email address it's sorta expected, and one could also argue about whether an email address is even private information.

Or maybe Facebook could allow the export of some other friend identifier.

I don't get why people have such a problem with this. If Hitler says genocide is wrong, does the fact that it came from Hitler make it any less true.

The arguments put forth either stand on their own or they don't. The fact that they came from a Facebook engineer is irrelevant.

They're stuck in a continuous defect!

Who cares. Seriously, this stuff is very much inside baseball which is why Facebook doesn't even care to comment. Changing the icon on the Like button will generate far more negative PR than this ever will, and spawn 10,000 "OMG, I hate the new like button" groups.

If I happend to email you once 2 years ago did I consent to be linked to you when you join Facebook?

I think the difference is that if you email someone, most everyone understands that you're giving the user your email address and permission to email you back unless you use a disposable email address. Contrast that "knowledge" with facebook email addresses. How many people are really aware of whether or not their email on facebook is public, friend of friend, friend, etc?

I suppose that's a separate usability and privacy concern than what we're discussing, but exporting data of friends just seems different to me than exporting contacts from Google. Janet may have exposed her email address and phone number to me on facebook by "friending" me, but she's really just an acquaintance I met through a friend and emailing or calling her is more intimate than either of us want. Conversely, Judy and I met through a work colleague and she wants to do lunch and talk about a startup so she asked for my email address. I now feel like I have permission to email her as well.

My argument doesn't sound convincing, even to myself, but I still feel like the two forms of interaction and communication come with different inherent understandings. I have ~130 friends on facebook all of whom I've met in person save a single contact. The one I haven't met I would and have emailed, but out of the others I'd say 20% are people that would be welcome to receiving an email from me and vice versa. Emailing the other 80% would feel like an encroachment on my part. That said, why would I never need to mass download or import facebook contact details? I've already added the people I am inclined to email into my Google contacts, because there has been a mutual and deliberate decision to exchange contact information.

Not sure where I'm going with this, thinking out loud perhaps. ;)

Edit: Typos...