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Comment by stanmancan | Hacker News Reader

at the end of the day, all your profile are belong to us.

That one line was enough to convince me to delete my Facebook account again, once and for all. Thank you.

Why did you expect anything else from either company? By profile they really mean data. Every company out there offering free services is after your data and it definitely belongs to them since they have the context for it. Your name and number and interests by themselves don't mean anything but put a context around it and that is what belongs to them.

     Why did you expect anything else from either company?

Google makes it easier on all of their services to download your data. Including the phone numbers and emails of your own contacts.

     Every company out there offering free services is
     after your data

That quote is not in the context you're putting it -- the original comment meant that your profile belongs to Facebook and you can't move it easily.

I really hope that was a troll and not a Facebook employee.

     it definitely belongs to them since they have the 
     context for it

No it doesn't. By law your data belongs to you and you're granting them the privilege of using it.

Was thinking the same. Fuck any company with that level of lock-in.

I take it you don't use gmail as your email provider then?

gmail doesn't lock you in... so I am not sure what your point is.

My point was that Facebook don't also provide email services. Perhaps lock-in is too strong a term, but it's certainly convenient enough to discourage using anything other than gmail - and means that google will own a much larger chunk of your online identity than Facebook does now.

> My point was that Facebook don't also provide email services.

Incorrect, as of a few months ago. Every(?) Facebook user now has an email address: <userID>@facebook.com. You can send messages to external email addresses from the messages tab.

Actually, I do, but I do it by redirecting mail to my DNS to my gmail account. If I change provider, I don't need to tell everyone my new email address.

"to convince ... again" or "to delete ... again" ? I mean have you tried to delete already ? :)

He's a troll. That sentiment is not prevalent in the company.

Then why I can't easily export my friends list from Facebook to Google+?

Someone published a hack:

(1) Open up a Yahoo account (2) Import Facebook contacts into the Yahoo account (3) In the add people to circles page, import from the Yahoo account.

Because Google is too proud to use the simple AJAX API that Facebook provides to do so.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer/?method=GET&#...

that seemed weird that they wouldn't just use that, but the facebook platform policies don't seem too keen on that kind of use (which makes more sense than your post, considering the legal claims facebook has made in the past against harvesters of their data, but I could still be wrong).

https://developers.facebook.com/policy/

Is this how those facebook -> google+ exporters are working, though?

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