So google is going to sell me out? But facebook isn't? What about Verizon? How do you know what companies to trust with private information?
(Edit: And in answer to your other question, about which organisations I personally can trust, we have fairly strict laws in my country about privacy and data protection, which limit what any of these companies may legally do and give me various rights with regard to any personally identifiable data anyone holds about me. I don't think those laws go far enough, but IMHO they're certainly better than the free-for-all you seem to want. So I can have some confidence in how my data will be handled by any company operating in our jurisdiction, which immediately makes me more likely to trust them than US-based companies like Facebook and Google whose business models fundamentally rely on undermining privacy in ways that are rarely going to be in the interests of the exposed.)
If my friends have trusted me with their information they also trust me to make sure to keep it safe. What service I use to store my data should not be of any consequence for them. That is the same way with this Facebook exporter (BTW, the iPhone app allows one to sync contacts from Facebook to the iPhone address book, which can then get sync'ed to .Mac, Me, or the new iCloud, from there back to a Mac and then back up to Google), it allows the user to get the data from Facebook and store it in their address book. Instead of having to go through each entry one by one this plugin automates the process.
I don't see how my friends that clearly have made this data available to me (so I could contact them) should now have a say as to how and where I store said data. Just because I decide to store it in my address book on Google doesn't make much if a difference, if they didn't want me to have that data in the first place they should have A. never have given it to me, or B. ask me to please remove their information.
One more time, for the record: Your friend trusted you with their personal data, not Google. You may not personally have a problem with sharing your own personal data with Google, but not everyone is like you, and some people do. That doesn't mean they have a problem with sharing the data with you in the first place or that it was somehow unreasonable of them to give it to you.
I really can't understand why so few people in this discussion seem to understand the distinction. We have multiple Acts of Parliament on the subject here in the UK and an entire government department whose primary responsibility is enforcing the rules, so I'm clearly not the only one who gets it or thinks it's important. Maybe it's a cultural/generational thing, and the average person on HN just sees the world differently or something. Then again, the average person on HN today downvotes rather than replying if they disagree, based on my experience in this discussion and what's happened to several other people in other discussions I've been following, so things have obviously gone way downhill.
If you wish to not receive certain communications the way to do this is by screening incoming connections/contents. This works, unlike secrets.
Now, understanding that what you wanted to do (keep an email address secret) is a bad idea - it won't do what you want, you can see why those who understand don't care about this "privacy" - it isn't.
Claiming to authorize your email address being shared with CompanyX but not CompanyY is like saying "Here's my phone number, I'm only lettingVerizon subscribers know it, to keep AT&T from snooping on which of their users calls me." It's just nonsensical.