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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

And you still can't export your friends (except for the useless text list of names).

The idea--which I am rather partial to--is that my email address is my information, not yours.

Could you explain this ? I am confused now.. I was under the impression that your email address is not exportable if you do not display it http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy. So is not similar to me manually writing it down on paper ?

I just can't sympathize with this viewpoint at all. Your email address is the first thing you give out to your contacts, so that they can contact you. Before Facebook, anyone who wanted to contact you via the Internet would need to know it. A "friends list" is totally useless without this one vital piece of information.

So "friends" need your permission to email you ? I am comfortable with the idea that my friends will store my email address in their personal address book (or data store)...

No, that's why I have my email visible to friends.

However, that doesn't mean I give them permission to easily mass import it through Facebook to whatever *Ville app is popular that day. If they allowed email export, my email is very quickly being hidden.

You would have a point if I couldn't see your email by clicking on your info tab...

Likewise, you would have a point if Facebook allowed me to export your profile, not just my own.

My original point was that Facebook should allow me to export my contacts, at least the info they chose to share with me.

A problem here is that the 'download my data' feature doesn't let you download any sort of primary key for your friends. A name is not a primary key--I have many friends with the exact same name.

Can't you just run a bunch of API calls, then zip the result?

The problem is that the API will only return the email field for the current user (assuming the 'email' permission is set.)

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