Gmail: Trap my contacts now (warning when exporting contacts to Facebook)
google.com
google.com
This will slow down my AOL-using friends who gave away all their contact info to Facebook and now I get pelted with spam from Facebook using my name and list of friends (and I don't even have a Facebook account).
Google has never spammed me or share my name and location, Facebook does it all the time, pick who's more evil.
Google did not return any of your contacts. You can still find your friends on Facebook by uploading a file of your Gmail contacts below.
... followed by instructions on how to download my gmail contacts to a file and re-upload them.
So it seems that Google's implementation of their "whining at you about their problems while you're just trying to get on with your life" page is broken.
The end result is that you cannot export your contacts from Gmail at the present.
To someone who can do it either way, this may just seem like an annoyance, but a great many people won't grasp the severity of what they are about to do by handing their credentials for gmail over to facebook.
- That's a big step back.
- It makes things worse for their users.
- There is no positive effect from the change.
- They did it on purpose.
Seems like a good idea to me.
The greedy game theory strategy in this case ends up being bad for consumers, they can not download their social graph from Facebook. Game theory subjects that when the vast major of agents are using the greedy strategy that is is impractical for a generous or tit for tact agent to survive. Each company that plays the greedy strategy is a step down the road to the greedy equilibrium. Where no companies offer easy methods to download your social graph or relevant information.
Google played a tit for tat strategy and did the world a service by preventing one step on the road to the greedy equilibrium.
You CAN download your graph data. You can get friends lists with UIDs, and that is theoretically AND practically enough to reconstruct the graph on a third party site. The only difference between getting UIDs and emails is the third party site won't be able to spam all your friends or connect you with your friends unless you've also opted to use Facebook graph data.
* Google could provide google UIDs instead of emails when downloading contacts. This is theoretically and practically enough to reconstruct the social graph as well. Every company could use their own UID for downloads instead of emails. I do not think it would be practical to reconstruct a social graph across companies however. This is a greedy strategy that would cause inefficiencies and prevent innovation in my opinion.
No that doesn't follow because on Google Contacts I give you my email address. On Facebook I "friend" you, which doesn't really even necessarily mean I'm your friend. I don't want you then to be able to automatically export my email to third parties.
> * Google could provide google UIDs instead of emails when downloading contacts. This is theoretically and practically enough to reconstruct the social graph as well. Every company could use their own UID for downloads instead of emails. I do not think it would be practical to reconstruct a social graph across companies however. This is a greedy strategy that would cause inefficiencies and prevent innovation in my opinion.
Google Contacts is for storing emails you've collected. Facebook is for friending people and I just happened to have to provide my email when signing up... oh just like about every other site on the web.
You can make your email private in Facebook and you do not have to friend people. I would argue for a downloadable list of contacts/email address whose emails you have access to. Facebook already allows hotmail+yahoo access to the email lists, the individual user can not download it directly.
>Google Contacts is for storing emails you've collected. Facebook is for friending people and I just happened to have to provide my email when signing up... oh just like about every other site on the web.
Add decide to let everyone on your friends list have access to your email address, unless you make it private that is. So I would say Facebook is different in this regard then every other site on the web.
I friend people based on the assumption that they can't export my email to arbitrary third parties (which is true at the moment). If this is no longer true I would delete all my friends, sue facebook, and meet friends in person to socialize. But the other thing you mention is reasonable. But it would have to be opt-in since by default I don't think people would want this. Also since originally signing up this feature was not implied.
Facebook wants us to use our Gmail username and password to import contacts from those services directly into their network but they don't want us importing our contacts into Twitter?
I don't get how that is not a greedy thing.
Because most of Facebook's users didn't sign up for this. They didn't sign up to necessarily share contact info. They signed up to connect socially. Do you expect twitter to start handing out email addresses of the people that sign up on Twitter.com? No because you sign up on Twitter to share short 140 character messages, not email addresses like you do when you sign up to use Google Contacts.
If a third party application wants your email addresses, you can go give it to them yourself. Otherwise what's the point of Facebook making it dead simple for people to give third party apps your email address? The only reason I can think is that greedy third party apps want to siphon Facebook's built up social graph by using spammy viral emailing techniques as opposed to getting individual users to sign up or add the Facebook application.
Also correct me if I'm wrong, but Facebook does let you compare email hashes. So this allows 3rd party apps/sites to link two users up if they are friends on Facebook.
So in the end yes it is convenient for Facebook to take this stance of not making it easy to export your friends' email addresses but it truly does have a legitimate negative aspect to it. And in the end Facebook still provides the requisite methods to make it easy for people to leave Facebook.
So I can certainly export my Google contact data. I don't have a Facebook account, so I don't know whether it can import it. But the data is there, in an easy to parse format.
Right; there are practical usability problems with allowing willy-nilly access to your contact list. Some of your contacts have now given your email address to a company with which you never wanted to have a relationship.
Which is precisely Facebook's reasoning for not providing an API to download your friends' email addresses. Thanks for providing a concrete reminder of the legitimacy of this choice.
"Facebook - we protect your contacts, so unscrupulous websites can't spam them like we do."
This is a red herring. Facebook lets me choose whether my friends can give away literally anything else that's part of my Facebook presence to third party apps. In fact, there's a strong recommendation that I allow as much access to apps as possible, in the name of a "more social" experience. They let apps that I've never used spam me daily, I don't really get the sense that they care whether they force me into relationships with companies I have no interest in, as long as it happens within Facebook.
Why should I not get to decide whether to expose my e-mail address? If I want to, I'm allowed to set my e-mail address to "Everyone" visibility in my profile, literally the only thing I'm not allowed to do is expose it via the API.
That's a very deliberate choice, and maybe I'm a cynic, but it strikes me as mighty telling that the lack of API access to the e-mail part of the social graph is just about the only barrier in the way of Google being able to reconstitute the entire Gmail intersection of Facebook's social graph (Facebook UIDs don't suffice, because Google can't match these to e-mail addresses without the users explicitly doing so for them).
However, this wish has no effect on Facebook, they will continue to send him invites on the behalf of his friends, who uploaded his email address for him.
Handing information to a company with which a user never wanted to have a relationship is bad when it results in spam-filled inboxes, which end users might notice and directly associate with FB's policies. As long as the potential abuse is hidden from the user's view, though, FB wholeheartedly endorses it.
So why does it give it to Yahoo mail and Hotmail? Please answer that question.
Relevant link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889378
"Facebook's reasoning for not providing an API" is because they want to protect me from other Facebook type companies? Really?
...or is it that they don't want us moving our data to another social network?
Let's get real. Facebook can spin it however they want. We all know what's up!
Much much much more wiery when people give out their email password to any other service period. Plus why would you care if you can't get the info out of facebook? You already have it in gmail. I dunno, I feel like I dodged so many bullets by not using facebook.
Relevant quote from Google:
"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks - when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click"
Lets recap:
1. Users use data exporter en masse to abandon Orkut.
2. Google breaks the exporter. Supposedly a bug, coincidentally when people are actually now using it.
3. Google changes the exporter so emails are no longer included.
4. Google says social networks shouldn't be expected to allow mass email exportation.
5. 12 months pass
6. Google breaks the gmail exporter to Facebook. Social networks apparently are now expected export all e-mails. Press eats it up.
Look, I'm not arguing that email exporting should or shouldn't be allowed. I don't really want my friends giving my email to Farmville so they get a golden banana, but it's not the end of the world. What I don't get though, is people talking about this like Google is some godly force of good, championing the rights of users against the evil Facebook.
Please. Google is getting scared, and made a calculated (albeit hypocritical) business decision to try and slow down Facebook's growth. The rest of this is BS PR spin and Techcrunch sensationalism to fan the drama fires.
I think Google has lost sight of something very simple in this fracas:
With Google Contacts, the user directly manages his contacts' email addresses.
With Facebook, the user delegates management of email address to his contacts.
These are not the same thing. The Google contacts team seems to think that Facebook is an address book just like them. They are not. And to me, that failure to understand the differences is the root source of all this tomfoolery.
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Edit after some very welcome discussion downstream:
On GMail, my contacts' email addresses are MY data.
On Facebook, my contacts' email addresses are NOT my data. The FACT that I am connected to my contacts is my data, but any information about those contacts does not belong to me.
This is why Facebook is not an address book, and pretending it as an address book where "your data gets stuck" is bound to lead to frustration for everyone.
In any case, even if there is a big difference, you haven't really said why the debate hinges on a failure to understand it.
That's a pretty big difference.
"essentially locking up your contact data about your friends"
Note the first 'your' in that sentence: From Google's P.O.V., the email address of your friend is your data. From Facebook's P.O.V, the email address of your friend is not your data -- it's the friend's data.
Does adding you as a friend on a social network site gives you an implicit moral permission to upload my "visible to friends" data to a third party web-site?
I guess what you are saying is that the answer to these two questions need not be the same.
[ The fact that Facebook will let you export my data to Yahoo (which will let you re-export it to anyone, just like GMail) kind of indicates that it is not the fine distinction above that governs Facebook's actions. ]
With Facebook, you delegate authority to manage email address to YOUR CONTACTS (not Facebook).
In Google or any other address book, I can go into my friend Ted's contact and change his email address if I want to.
In Facebook, I can't change Ted's email address. Only Ted can change it.
To me, this is a MAJOR distinction.
And you know what? Maybe you're right. Maybe Google DOES understand this just fine. But I think the strong language they're using, the bombastic language of "fairness" and "protectionism", implies that they are taking a subtle, nuanced issue of data ownership and pretending it's binary.
From your statement, I am guessing you believe that the email addresses of your contacts is your data.
So here's the thought experiment:
Amy uses GMail and has been corresponding with Bill, who works at Acme. Bill's email address, bill@acme.com, is in Amy's GMail address book. "bill@acme.com" is now a piece of data that is, unquestionably, "owned" by Amy.
Amy joins Facebook, uses the GMail importer to detect if any of her GMail contacts are also on Facebook, and sees that Bill is on Facebook. She asks to be Bill's friend, and he accepts.
Several months later, Bill gets a new job. He now works for The Nonprofit Foundation, and his new email address is bill@nonprofit.org. Bill logs into his Facebook account and updates his email address.
Because Amy uses Facebook and is friends with Bill, she can see his new email address.
Is the piece of data "bill@nonprofit.org" now "owned" by Amy?
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Personally, I think it's a complex question. I don't automatically ascribe ownership of "bill@nonprofit.org" to Amy, and it's hard for me to say that she has a right to export that email address out of Facebook. Others may disagree. But I would hope we ALL can agree that the above scenario is not black and white, and that we can have a reasoned discussion about data ownership.
Choose your friends carefully, but choose the data you put on Facebook with even more discretion.
Facebook and Google are using those email addresses for very different purposes: Facebook uses them to identify the profiles of your contacts (the user id is the lasting identity) whereas for Google the email address itself is the relevant identity.
Define "export". Are you saying that she only has the "right" to use Bill's address within Facebook, so that sending Bill an email with Outlook or GMail is some sort of violation? Or is it only automated mass export that you object to?
I did this, and even though it's super crappy because it doesn't map to my existing address book entries very well, at least I finally have my FB friends' email addresses.
Honestly I could care less if the email address used for Facebook is publicly posted and I get spammed from every penis enlargement pill salesmen on the planet, I never read it.
When my actual Gmail address gets passed to Facebook by someone who joined and imported their contact list, and then they email me, I find it to be far more of an invasion of privacy.
I do not agree to it.
I could see how this could scare the average user into thinking their contacts are moved from Google to facebook and stuck there, thus loosing their ability to use them within Google's products.
Do you think this is the intention?
Google is so engineering-oriented, I can't tell if this was an honest, poor choice of wording or intentionally vague for the purpose of inducing fear. I'm not against the warning if it's in the spirit of educating users about how to keep their data "free", but if this is indeed vendetta as others here are suggesting...well, that's Google's prerogative, but this method would seem a bit unprofessional. If they want to attack Facebook, I'd have more respect if they were explicit about it in this warning.
"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click."
The occasion was Google disabling exporting of contacts from Orkut to Facebook. I happen to think that both Google then, and Facebook now, are perfectly correct. However, I am curious how those who see Google as clearly in the right, and Facebook as clearly in the wrong, would reconcile Google's statement and actions of a year ago with its statements and actions of the last several days.
Edit: citation http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-to-...
And i really like this move from google.
Even Michael Bay was better than this.
I think Facebook might have gone to far with Facebook Deals. Now Groupon, its friends and other bystanders start to react less kindly to Facebook's business model: Copying ideas from other websites with nothing in return. Oh, well.
However, I can see your angle as well. It seems that the world is not black and white after all :(
edit: added "and nowhere else (which is a key point)"
Maybe they will care some day ...
Facebook is okay to be a dead-end for contacts' emails, since the email upload is used once to find others on the service. After that, if you need to contact someone else on Facebook, you can do so with a wall post or an inbox message. The email address is irrelevant.
With an address book, you need it to be portable, since the medium is accessible from many different locations and services.
The fact is that you dont need to get your friends' contact details out of Facebook. You sign up for Facebook to make Friends on Facebook and communicate over Facebook. Not to communicate over email, etc. (And certainly not over a rival network.) When you add someone to your address book, you do so to communicate with them over email, or phone, or whatever, which are inherently completely open and interconnected systems. [Surely there is a debate to be had here about the ubiquity of Facebook as a platform and that it should be open - could you imagine Facebook Clients? But I dont believe that's a debate about exporting existing contact info.]
To that end, Google warning users about the terminal nature of their exported data is unnecessary and only confuses the process of finding friends for users (who, by the way, aren't thinking about data portability, or building up an address book/contacts list on Facebook, they're thinking about making Friends on Facebook, to communicate over Facebook)
TL;DR: This whole mess doesn't matter, and Google is only making things complicated for users.
Same thing can happen with Google Contacts, but the difference is that on Contacts you give out your email. On Facebook you signup with an email and then you "friend" someone.
Second because they are in the wrong. The last thing in the world I want is my friends on Facebook to be able to give MY email address to random third-parties in return for free virtual pets or whatever Zynga is giving away this week. Google's moralism would mean much more spam and a far worse experience with Facebook. My being a "friend" with someone does not imply permission to let them give my contact information to third parties. Who is Google to say otherwise?
Google is keeping its data export open because it's providing an email service and is in competition with Yahoo and Hotmail. Perhaps they're not so sure about whether that is a good idea. If they think their business model has a problem they should fix the problem, not lecture Facebook about how the company runs its own business.
What?
The distinction between apps and users is already very clear at every level in Facebook. I don't understand what technical issues you're talking about.
This could be an issue for people who blindly accept spam friend requests, but not for apps. Just because users get an export function doesn't automatically mean apps do as well, unless Facebook specifically implements it.
Facebook has good reasons not to open their social graph -- and Google's lecturing them about noblesse oblige on this front is silly. Google should make decisions about its data portability policy based on its own needs. If they don't like this kind of access close the API. Keeping it open but shrill and insensible like this is amateur.
As for what you say is the question under discussion, as somebody said over here, facebook can perfectly distinguish between a user exporting his contacts and an app trying to scrap personal info. They wont do it because they dont want anybody to export his relationships (in email adresses terms) so that they can rebuild their social graph out of their webpage. Facebooks leverage is users, and that action would make possible for users to migrate.
In any case, facebooks behaviour only damages users ability to control their data (or at least have a backup of it)
None of the existing companies have to let you leave freely or support the movement of your data, but to a large extent they have been willing to and it has benefitted the end users, the economy, and the web, in the form of new start-ups, new mash-ups, and interesting ways to view and share the data you've put into other systems. If one company wants to benefit from that sharing, but not return the favor, I think consumers ought to call them on it. The unfortunate fact that most users don't understand the effect means that other companies are going to have to make them aware, and Google is taking that step.
I hope they succeed, but it isn't because I think Google needs the graph access: it is because in the end it will benefit the end user in general and us (hn/new startups) to do so.
That is, indeed, the question under discussion.
But the question that should be under discussion is whether I should have the ability to toggle an "e-mail" field alongside the 18 other fields of information that Facebook allows me to expose to apps when a friend decides to sign up for a virtual pet. Facebook encourages me to share my pictures, my status updates, my location, my birthday, etc., with apps that my friends use, yet doesn't even allow me to choose whether to share my e-mail address.
For my protection, my ass. If that ability didn't go against their business interests, you can bet there'd be an option to allow that.
I liked this. So Godfatheresque!
I don't know if this is a bug.
Neither is doing this for the users. They are doing it to help their services grow and ultimately to help their bottom line grow. Believing anything else would be naive at this point.
It used to be a 30 second task to sift through your address book and check off people to send friend requests to. Now, thanks to Google behaving like children, I need to figure out how to export her contacts as a text file so that I can upload it to Facebook.
Google, please stop.
You are pissing off your customers.
Edit: subsititure Users for Customers in the previous sentence if it helps you to parse it. The end result is still the same: The people who use Google's service are being punished by Google for the actions of a 3rd party.
Edit: Google charges for things like AdWords, of which I am a heavy user. So yes, people do in fact pay them money for things.
And whether Gmail is paid for as an explicit line-item or not isn't what matters here; most of the money that funds Gmail comes from AdWords and Google's behavior with Gmail impresses upon AdWords customers. It's all done with Google's name and image and it all reflects back on Google collectively. It's perfectly fine to feel sad when a vendor does something you don't like with a "bonus product", even if you weren't billed specifically for your usage of that product.
In any case, we aren't really arguing about anything relevant to the discussion at hand.
I happen to think that the original comment was rather trollish given that he can still export his girlfriend's contact information from gmail. He just needs to click two more times now. I think the upvotes my comment got are reflective of a similar feeling about the whole thread from other HNers.
Even if it wasn't, Google opens itself to criticism and review whether their service is free or not. We definitely shouldn't temper our ideas or give Google a pass because "it's free"; that might excuse some advanced features, but it definitely doesn't extend into basics like contact exporting. That's a fundamental, and something that many have blasted Facebook, also ostensibly a "free" service, for not supporting well.
Google is making money off of Gmail. If they weren't making money off of Gmail, they would have discontinued the service a long time ago. Even if the nominal costs exceed the direct profits gained from Google Apps licenses and the display of AdWords, etc., which I tend to doubt, the indirect benefits are obviously valuable.
Should we all feel a great gratitude to the for-profit corporation Google for pursuing their best interest? Certainly we all appreciate the free services, but Google is no charity and expecting an altruistic, anything-goes attitude to their products is silly. They are a serious company making serious money and competing in a serious space, there's no need to make up excuses for them, especially naive ones like, "Well it's free anyway so you shouldn't expect anything out of it".
Why do TV networks continue interrupt their "customers" with ads even though their "customers" don't want ads? That's because their "customers" are not their customers. Their customers are the people paying for those ads and they get to interrupt the "customers" with ads.
It's very important to recognize distinction the between users (aka "customers") and customers if you want your company to survive. "Customers" are the product you sell.
Nothing is truly 'free'.
Negation of this fact, provides companies who offer their services for 'free' with an excuse to treat their users badly.
What if you would have picked today (or rather any other day) to set up a new gmail account for your girlfriend and needed her facebook contacts?
Those users, however, clearly do like that 3rd party service, and would just like to get on with setting up their account there.
Any action at all by Google during that process (other than the expected one) just makes things worse for their users. The adult thing to do, then, is to simply not do anything to make matters worse.
I guess, if enough users would complain to Google or feel the need to leave their awesome free services for a more Facebook-friendly vendor, good for them. It's not like there's no choice since you can you know... export your data.
I can't be the only one who thinks this is more than a bit weird.
Perhaps this is an older gentleman? The only people I can imagine being unable to set-up a Facebook account comfortably are 50+. And even then, I know for a fact a lot of them can.
Users in Facebook are more volatile. While Facebook is a lot more 'addictive', with time the lack of value it actually provides becomes apparent and it becomes two things for most people: an open-id provider and a distraction hub. Google offers actual value to their customers and therefore commands a sense of loyalty that Facebook doesn't get because of main issue in this fight. Opening the data Facebook collects to fair use of their customers is a big step in providing value, Facebook is just afraid that this integration might fuel competition. How very Microsoft right?
I think this is misleading - Doesn't Facebook allow you to download all of your data, just like Google? As much as I dislike Facebook's privacy policies, the mudslinging seems a little thick from both sides.
Facebook and Google - two of the biggest privacy violating companies on the planet. May you live in interesting times, indeed.
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=32853197098&...
I'm just waiting for Facebook to release a real email service ala gmail in the near future to escalate this battle.
I ask because FB messaging, like Gmail, is already available on the two platforms that matter today - web browsers and smartphones. Yeah, you need a FB account to use FB messaging, but if you don't have Facebook, you're not a real person, at least according to Quora (along with any other FB-connect only site). (Quora has since backpedaled on that stance.)
The obvious interoperability move - letting you reply-by-email to FB messages is something they'll never do, because it means you don't have to sign into FB, which they can't have.
Or more concretly: the ability to receive messages from people you don't already have as contacts.
You can then export from there as CSV etc., and pull them into other services. I set up a one-time Ymail account just to try this out, and it worked just fine.
So any claims by Facebook that they can't do this due to users' privacy etc are completely bogus. It's just that Google won't give them money to do it.
https://www.google.com/mail/help/contacts_export_confirm.htm...
By the link of this, one can see that only exporting to Facebook would render this confirmation message.
We all know that Opt-in is like "does not exist", but they could at least say they are open.
edit: They could even sell it as a privacy feature ...
This reeks of a cheap shot.
Therefore being able to register a complaint not signed in seems odd but fine.
What do they want to achieve by having the user click a button just to feel good?
Counting 'votes' provides useful data for Google internal decision-making.
Counting 'authenticated votes' provides useful data for Google to publish.
Lacking any information from Google, it is unclear whether this is just a "feel good" button or if it's an actual authenticated vote-counting system.
A service that won't let me "get my contact information out"? Nice way to frame this in terms of "openness" too, apparently riding "open" for all it's worth with Android is not enough.
Can I just "get out" all of my personal information from Google? No? Isn't Google "open" enough to let me do it?
We think this is an important thing for you to know before you import your data there.
Did you also think it was super duper important with a cherry and smarmy bullshit on top to let me know before you gave Facebook my GMail contacts behind the scenes when I was registering there earlier this year?
No, and I was disgusted when Facebook started suggesting them for "friends" right away.
Mostly yes. http://www.dataliberation.org/
I'm not terribly interested in a chance to "get out" my data from services that will keep my data anyway.
They also did give Facebook my GMail contacts, which I thought was scuzzy, but hey that's alright as long as I can export stuff out from various Google services!
It's safe to assume Google has been getting something in return all along, but now something's changed, and they decided to make a big fuss about the whole thing.
Then they say things like:
a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends.
Locking up? --> "Open" vs "Closed" again.
So once you import your data there, you won’t be able to get it out.
I bet that most people would think of "getting something out" as removing it. They make it sound like you should be able to remove "your data" from Facebook..
you are always free to download your contacts using the export feature in Google Contacts
.. As if Google letting you export things from various Google services amounted to the same thing, which it doesn't. No matter how much you export your data, Google will still be keeping a copy of everything, so talking about "getting it out" is disingenuous.
Because, after all, you should have control over your data.
Why did Google give "my data" to Facebook without asking me, or even notifying me about it then? After several years of handing people's contact information over to FB behind the scenes, why is it suddenly important that I have control over my data? Disingenuous.
But this is all just a PR-stunt and an attack against Facebook combined. Open vs Closed again, and Google parading around as a champion of Openness and your rights, when in the end, both parties are just corporations and only interested in making money off of you and "your" data.
That's why that position, to me, is untenable. Don't do evil indeed: you just conceded the other side (Facebook) their main argument (that they don't have to be open, only if they feel like it).
Yes, they are taking that stance, since they are imposing conditions on exporting data from gmail. If I owned and could do anything I wanted with my data on gmail, then Google could not impose restrictions. They just did (in their API restrictions). That's what I'm very concerned about.
As long as Google provides ways to get all your data that are free, public, easy to parse, and well-documented, they aren't imposing restrictions. If they add extra APIs or additional formats on top of that, it's gravy. Remember, the point of having these exports is to be able to get your data out and switch from service to service, so that the market stays competitive. It's not so that you have a fully-automated Google API for your profile that other programs can interact with.