Yesterday Facebook released a clever way to continue to download Google user data, despite Google banning Facebook from using their APIs. It looks to me like they aren’t going to try to stop Facebook from using this more manual approach. Instead, for now, it’s being escalated only via words:
We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.
That’s a nice swipe there in the beginning, about how they wish Facebook had spent time giving people a way to liberate their own Facebook data rather than building tools to end run around Google. That last bit though, about “people should be able to control the data they create” doesn’t quite hit the mark though in my opinion.
We’re talking about your Facebook friends list and their email addresses. You create your list of friends, of course, but you generally aren’t uploading email addresses to Facebook, your friends do. Still, I think there are excellent logic arguments for allowing users to download friends’ email addresses, too. More on that later.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
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