Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

So their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but <i>only as long as we both use Facebook?"</i><p>That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.

You mean Facebook, the company that has had a pretty rough PR year thanks to its deceptive privacy policies and practices?

Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is:<p>"Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.<p>Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.<p>Facebook Platform and the Graph API enable everyone to bring their own information to millions of sites and applications, including even Google’s YouTube."

I cannot think of a less appropriate organization to declare this exact criticism.

<i>The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information.</i><p>Sounds very noble but I suspect this is far from Facebook's "most important principle."

Openness also doesn't mean being a sucker. Share and share-alike provides an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma of openness.

Can a comment on the tech crunch blog by one of the Facebook engineers be taken as an official Facebook position?

They made up their contorted Social Expectation. Most of us have never really thought of what we expect our friends to be able to do with our information. I think we all assume that we trust our friends to occasionally share too much but you have to trust them to some point to just use their best judgement, even now they can go share your email anyway.<p>One way network grabs are cheap tactics. A user should be able to leave a network with the data that's been entrusted in them, just like with Address books, Calendars, or other trustingly shared data.<p>This is all about crippling the convenience of people leaving their network for competitors. You can already share with out permission, just not easily. This isn't about protecting our privacy, it's just about slowing down our power to go elsewhere at will.

Its been just about a year since I joined Facebook and started using it a lot. I have to say I'm kind of over it. I'm not closing my account or anything. I just think my usage is going to drop a bit precipitously.<p>I don't really trust Facebook anymore. I don't think they're evil, I just think at some point they're going to have to make some tough choices to live up to their valuation and the only real value they have (outside of ad eyeballs) is their user and graph information. Its going to end up in 3rd parties hands and I'm not very comfortable with that.<p>Anyway, not sure thats on point but it was something I've kind of been thinking about the last few days and this just drove a few points home.

It's interesting how noone wants to actually respond to the arguments that Mike Vernal is making, instead resorting to the equivalent of "Facebook is evil, how dare they say they aren't!".

Man, I can't believe we have these huge discussions about some petty fights. We know both parties are talking crap to uphold their selfish positions, don't we?

<i>A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.<p>Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends.</i><p>Not really, exporting your address book is the exact same thing as exporting a list of your friends' email addresses.<p>He had good points against Google, though.

I wonder if it is common strategy to have an export feature but willingly leave it broken. Some users will think they made a mistake and stay with the service out of inertia (?). I have seen broken exports in suspiciously many online services, most recently in everyone's favorite commenting engine. After filing a bug report, they quickly sent me my data and told me they are working on the issue. I want to believe !

If it's on the internet it's public domain, apparently.

Well, now I keep bouncing between Facebook and Google regarding who's "right".

The pimps are fighting over the data again. I wonder which one will win?

To make peace, maybe Google should buy Facebook. Or is it the other way round?

I've just noticed that Facebook suddenly looks shitty in Chrome (padding on the left up and went). Coincidence?