Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shenglong | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, on the other hand, does not make an effort to warn people the they’ve been tagged (possibly in an unflattering or compromising photo) and give them an immediate chance to remove the tag.

What? It definitely does. I get an email every time someone adds a picture of me. I also think a lot of us make an effort not to delete unflattering photos. Not every picture posted is nice, but it adds new dimensions to your online personality. If you don't like people adding your pictures, you can always change your privacy settings.

Most of these reasons other than data liberation are very one-sided. Facial recognition can be seen as a bad thing, but some would argue it's a nice feature. Although, honestly, what information on my Facebook would I want to liberate anyway? My years-old wall posts of "Omg I miss you" and "lol up!!!" that I never even look at?

View on HN

I also get updates on Facebook if I've been tagged.

And if you remove the tag, no one can tag you on that photo ever again.

If I understand things correctly... On G+ the notification email tells you someone _wants_ to tag a photo of you (it can't be tagged without your consent). On Facebook it gets tagged, you get the notification and you have to go to Facebook to remove the tag. That is an important difference.

I'll admit that I'm deeply biased by being a Facebook intern, but why is Data Liberation better than the equivalent feature on Facebook?

Because we're actually aware of it. I've been using Facebook since 2006, and I've never heard of such a feature on Facebook... and I know all about privacy settings and other features. Does Facebook actually have an export feature?

Account settings -> Security -> 'Click here to download a copy of the data you've put on Facebook.'

This downloads a .zip file with a static html human-browsable index of all your photos, notes, posts, friends' names, etc.

Does it download your friends' public email addresses and phone numbers?

If no, why not?

No.

Facebook's explanation is that because they respect your privacy, they think you should be able to withdraw access to contact information whenever you see fit.

In order for that to work, it goes, your friends should only be able to access contact information from within FB's walled garden, and never be able to export it. (Also the reason contact scraping Apps are met with cease and desist letters.)

BTW, you can export your friends' birthdays from the events page. This data is not included in the aforementioned bundle.

That is where this [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 ] extension entered.

First of all, this feature is sufficiently buried that when I looked around for it a couple days ago I was convinced that it simply didn't exist (though honestly it's not that buried, it's just not where I would expect it). It didn't allow me to download my information, it said I should receive an email when I can (it's "gathering") and after 25 minutes the email hasn't been sent. Honestly, even if the zip has exactly what I want in it, that is an unacceptable experience.

I created a yahoo account just so I could link it to my facebook account and export the contacts from yahoo. If linking to a third party and exporting from there is more straightforward than exporting the data directly there is something seriously wrong.

Secondly, I only want my contact information, why can I not get just it? If I was on a limited bandwidth connection or I had to pay per byte in particular it is completely absurd that I have to download everything that I don't care about to get what I do care about.

There is also the point that the facebook experience feels adversarial for some things. Sure they had almost exactly the same feature as Circles for a long time, but how many people ever used it? When I was using it it feels more like some VP at facebook was like "I guess we have to include this feature, but it will hurt our bottom line if too many people start using it so we should make it sufficiently complex and buried that no one uses it while still being available so that if anyone complains about the lack of security features we can point at the fact that it technically exists". Exporting data seems to have followed exactly the same line of thinking.

My last comment I will be unable to actually confirm until I am able to see what they are exporting, but if it is not in a format that I can import to gmail contacts (it supports several formats from major vendors) then it is worse than useless to me since it made me waste all this time to get something that isn't in a usable format. I'll update this comment either way when I am able to actually access the information that I requested.

I can't actually edit the post because its been too long. Just got the link, took over 3 hours and its an almost 100MB zip file (compare that to the ~50kb of actual data that I was interested in exporting).

The actual stuff has none of the stuff that I would actually want to export (my friends email addresses and phone numbers are not included), the photos aren't the originals that I uploaded (which I would actually like since I lost some of the higher resolution copies) and absolutely nothing is in a format that would be useful for using the data in another website. That is the entire point of data liberation; this is just allowing you to store facebook so you can view it without an internet connection. That is not at all what Google's data liberation or Yahoo!s export features do; they actually give you the information you want in a format that would allow you to use it with one of their competitors.

I hope that this post didn't sound too negative, Facebook is really a quality website in general and it's probably a great place to work, but the export feature is pretty clearly intentionally set up in a way that would make it impossible to use in any meaningful way. It is only very marginally different than doing a file > save page as in your browser. It's actually the perfect example of how opposed Facebook is to what Google is pushing when it talks about data liberation.

This is actually a fair question. I expected more from Google. Right now, the only better thing about Google's data liberation is that you get to export your contact information from it like any sane platform should let you.

But I expected more from Google than the weird, often non-standardized zip bonanza they're currently offering. Right now, both Google and Facebook's "data liberation" solutions are bad and have a lot of place for improvement.

Agreed. Some of the points were downright incorrect. The "Mobile App" one completely disregards that, while the G+ Android app may be superior, G+ doesn't even have an iPhone app, while Facebook does.

I think the larger point the author was making is that Google has a massive installed base of Mobile OS users, through its Android platform: "Google will seek more and more ways to make your Android phone a seemless appendage of your Google+ social platform."

Google+'s iPhone app is coming soon, and in the meantime you can access its web app through your browser: http://www.google.com/mobile/+/

Facebook just has mobile apps, and no mobile browser or OS (at least, so far). This positions Google+ fairly well in its efforts to build a social networking beachhead to compete with FB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com