I think this is just pissing users off. I want to import my contacts into Google+, but I currently have no desire to leave Facebook. After seeing this, that changes a bit.
Apparently there is a sanctioned method for pulling all of your Facebook friends into Yahoo contacts:<p><a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/invite-your-entire-facebook-graph-into-google-plus/2124" rel="nofollow">http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/invite-your-entire-faceboo...</a><p>From there you can do what you want with them.
There is a legitimate question here -- do you own the information about your friends, or do your friends? Many things on Facebook are a shared quasi-public, quasi-private space where the ownership isn't clear, and don't fit into our usual mental model of "I own my own data!"<p>This example is even clearer. The app lets you export your friends' names and contact information. This isn't your information, it's your friends'. What if one of them wanted to take their phone number off the site? What if one of them wanted to hide their information from you specifically? If you've downloaded it already you're depriving them of the right to control their own data.<p>Clearly social networks should be required to offer <i>some</i> sort of friend list information for export. Maybe a bare list of user ID's is all that should be required -- the information about who your friends are seems legitimately like it's <i>yours</i>. Joining it against names and contact information is the potentially privacy-invasive step; that could be done online, under control of your friends, not you.
From the article it seems like the app is scraping. Why? The Facebook Graph API should be able return all this data. That Facebook prevent scraping, which is most likely conducted by some scamming services, is a good thing IMHO considering most (all?) of the data is available through their API. If this is the case the title should be "Facebook prevents scraping" as Facebook still allows export of data through the API. The Facebook Graph API usage is managed by the specified permissions for the app and thus you can control it to a greater extend compared to a browser extension which could do whatever it wants to the pages you visit and your authenticated session.
Any legal eagles here on HN care to comment on the legality of this?<p>I would have hoped that data protection laws (I'm in the UK) would have protected this, since it provides me with access to my own data.
I am going to start off by saying I haven't read the article. With that said, didn't Google deny Facebook from scraping contacts off of gmail a year (or two) ago? I forget the exact method they implemented, but I know it stunted Facebook's ability to scrape the emails for a good while.<p>How is this any different?
Is this particularly new news? This extension was the first thing I tried Wednesday night when I got into the service, and it didn't export anything but profile URLs. I had to make a throwaway Yahoo account to export my contacts.
There's always various scrapers, like this <a href="http://vytautas.jakutis.name/2011/05/27/convert-your-facebook-friend-contacts-to-csv/" rel="nofollow">http://vytautas.jakutis.name/2011/05/27/convert-your-faceboo...</a> by me.
I managed to use it to export my contacts about an hour ago. Successfully imported them in to Gmail and G+. Strange.<p>I highly doubt that it is illegal, but it certainly breaks FB's TOS.
I think I used this extension months ago before it got blocked. Worked pretty well, but I found that it didn't get all the information that I was hoping for. Namely the e-mail address was missing for all of my contacts. Got their bio info. and other stuff though.
Also means @givememydata doesn't work. Was just planning on extracting list of email addresses...
<a href="https://twitter.com/#!/givememydata/status/88181497894404096" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/#!/givememydata/status/88181497894404096</a>
Actually they did not restrict the access to your own data, but to a specific method of accessing them. Which, I am quite sure, is no legal issue for anybody
Can't you import friends by downloading your friends list using the facebook export tool? Google can use that to match people up with their friends as long as their friends have opted into Google+ with their facebook UID too.