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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

The warning says: "Here’s the not-so-fine print. You have been directed to this page from a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends."

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.

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Facebook to my knowledge does not let you export your friends email addresses in a way that they could be synced with your email service. I think that if they did, it would be beneficial to everyone. Their claim that email addresses are private is bogus. They could add buttons to the privacy settings that would allow a user to block their email from being access by friends. There is no valid, as in non anti competitive, reason to hold on to names and email of your Facebook friends.

I'm just waiting for Facebook to release a real email service ala gmail in the near future to escalate this battle.

There already is an option not to show your email to friends. Just set the email field to 'Only Me'.

It does not apply to export, only allows or forbids display your email to your "friend"

How much 'real-er' does FB messaging need to get?

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.

well, they could add categorization/labels for one.

Or more concretly: the ability to receive messages from people you don't already have as contacts.

You can export your friends' email addresses from Facebook to sites that they have a deal with - e.g. Yahoo Mail.

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.

No, you can't get your "friends"' email info out.

I see, thanks for the clarification. So, you can download all of your pictures and wall posts, but not contact data.

There are several apps like this one that claim to export your friends and email address to CSV format.

http://apps.facebook.com/friendstocsv/

I didn't try it, but looking at the comments, it won't export email addresses

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=32853197098&...

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