9 ms·

Give Us Our Data, Facebook

71 points by andre3k1 16y ago

patrickaljord 16y ago
There is also the fact that Facebook does allow yahoo mail and hotmail to export their friends emails, proof: http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-export-email-addresses-55247 http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-ex... So why not gmail?
kingnothing 16y ago
That looks like some extra long rant about nothing. What data does this guy want? You can pull out nearly everything about a user via Facebook's numerous APIs, if they grant sufficient permissions.
- davidu 16y ago
  Not email/phone/etc. And despite this, you can get email via hotmail or yahoo mail contacts integration. It's fairly a hypocritical position for Facebook to take.
dmvaldman 16y ago
I'm glad facebook doesn't give out the email addresses of friends to third parties without permission, and I am for their distinction between owning the friend list, but not their friends' data. The public seems to not have a consistent sense of privacy. They slam Facebook for being too open by not having a privacy setting enforced as the default, and then slam Facebook again when Facebook isn't advertising emails. Personally not a fan of all this hot air.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  > I'm glad facebook doesn't give out the email addresses of friends to third parties without permission The problem is that they actually do with yahoo mail and hotmail http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234
- spdy 16y ago
  Mh why is it ok for yahoo and microsoft to access my friends email over an api but not for myself or a third party vendor (like google). http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-export-email-addresses-55247 http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-ex... If i want to export all of my data out of facebook why cant i get these kind of informations?
- _sh 16y ago
  When I sign up to Facebook and use their contact list importer, they are using the private email addresses of my friends to link me into their network. When I export my social graph, Facebook will not return to me the email addresses I gave it when I signed up. Either way, all this bluster is a red herring. The article has it right: Facebook is outright lying when they claim this is about protecting its users--people who have explicitly agreed to include themselves in my social graph in the first place. It's about owning the social graph.
bretthellman 16y ago
They should have used the title "Facebook is lying"
chrischen 16y ago
I'm siding with Facebook on this. You can already get Facebook UIDs, which can be used to reconstruct the graph edges. You don't want to store Facebook UIDs? Build your own social graph. And Facebook is right. I own MY info on Facebook. I can prove it. I'll just delete my account with my email address. If you were my friend let's see if you still have acces to that info. If they start letting my friends export my email to third parties then I'm getting off Facebook. EDIT: Think about it. Most sites these days require an email. It's not exactly optional info to use Facebook. Are we seriously considering that it's acceptable that we let friends EXPORT people's email addresses for third parties just because they "friended" on Facebook? Maybe if there was a new "Share my email" feature this would be acceptable but "friending" != "here you can give my email to third parties and here's an easy API for you to do that"
- robryan 16y ago
  Your friends might not but Facebook sure will still have access to your email address.
  - chrischen 16y ago
    I'm assuming they actually delete the info when I tell them to delete it. But in any case my friends won't have access to that info therefore it's not their right to export that info to others unless I give them permission to (which I won't).
    - sciboy 16y ago
      So you are saying that it's ok to export email addresses from gmail but not email addresses from facebook? Can you explain?
      - kmavm 16y ago
        Not to speak for GP, but that is a perfectly reasonable position to take, and one that I would take. They're different services; GMail does not have third-party apps in the same sense. Facebook's app ecosystem has some quite disreputable parties in it; an API that lets these parties have access to friends' email addresses would place a lot of Facebook users' emails in the hands of companies that they have no direct relationship with or knowledge of.
miratrix 16y ago
The problem is that Facebook's claiming that email is just another piece of metadata about a user. However, from Google's point of (and rest of the non-Facebook web), email is not a metadata, but the key identifier around which all of the services know which "John Smith" the given user is. If I'm building anything interesting and want to play outside the Facebook walled garden, the Facebook ID doesn't really get me anything - it's like someone giving me a currency from a random country that I never intend to visit. Unfortunately, even Facebook itself treats the email address as an identifier data (what do you need to use to log in to Facebook? Email address and password). It's a little disingenuous for them to turn that around and say that it's a metadata that's part of the user's profile, as opposed to the only unique, persistent, and widely used identifier that we currently have on the web.
- chrischen 16y ago
  Actually the facebook uid is very useful. Why else would facebook competitor.com need a friends email addresses but to spam them to sign up? If two people sign up with facebook data dumps you can still link them up via data dumps. Another useful feature is email hashed (dunno if it's still supported. But if you have someone's email you can connect compare email hashed so emails are never revealed.
danielnicollet 16y ago
This soo wrong. Arrington keeps using the word "friends" as if emails from your FB contacts were those of your actual friends. Imagine Arrington being able to turn 4000 "friends" on Facebook into a mass email list!!! No way! That just so wrong and I don't want that to happen. The premise under wich we befriend someone on Facebook just never included them being able to email you directly. In my case, it would be the last thing to happen before I quit FB entirely and stuff my account with bogus info or close it altogether.
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  The problem is that they actually do with yahoo mail and hotmail http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234 or read the other posts on this threads.
- andreyf 16y ago
  I'm the opposite. If I facebook friended someone, I've most likely met them in person, and hence providing my virtual contact is quite all right. Facebook, in a way, is the place you say things to people you're likely to meet face-to-face. I'm not friends with Arrington on facebook, and wouldn't ever expect to be, although I'd probably follow him on twitter if any of my twitter-friends retweeted him. Yet, his e-mail is probably public knowledge. My point: it's all relative. To converge on a compatible set for all of these rules is social evolution.
- DjDarkman 16y ago
  So it's right to export your 4000 contacts from GMail and mass mail them, but it's wrong to do the same with Facebook. With GMail I can export everything and import it to an E-Mail client of my choosing, with Facebook this is impossible, if I join a new social network I have to do everything manually.
- stoney 16y ago
  As I understand it, taking a list of FB contacts and turning them into a mass email list would be a violation of the CAN-SPAM rules - people need to explicitly agree to be added to a mail list.
gojomo 16y ago
At both Gmail and Facebook, the most common way someone new winds up in your 'contacts' is they send you a message, and you somehow 'ack' that you want to maintain a link to them. (Or vice-versa.) From that point on, your view includes the email address they freely volunteered to you. That's the info anyone should be able to export. Facebook wanting to pretend that somehow, contact info shared between friends in their system can't go any further than Facebook is just a self-serving rationalization. Now, you don't have to show your email addresses to any or all friends on Facebook -- it's part of the privacy controls. So naturally if I don't show it to certain people, those people shouldn't be able to export it. And it's a nice feature of Facebook that me changing my privacy settings, or de-friending someone, essentially recalls my email from their contacts, unless they took special steps to copy it elsewhere earlier. But in the meantime, if I can see it, and copy & paste it, and use it to send messages, it's mine at that moment, even though Facebook may be holding it for me.
Derferman 16y ago
Facebook can't claim that "every person owns and controls his/her information" when the Graph API allows access (via friends permissions) to your friends' status, likes, notes, location, photos, relationships, checkins, website, groups, events, activities and birthdays[1]. In fact, the only information about your friends not available via friends permissions are email addresses and full streams. [1]: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...

71 points by andre3k1 16y ago

There is also the fact that Facebook does allow yahoo mail and hotmail to export their friends emails, proof: http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-export-email-addresses-55247 http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-ex... So why not gmail?

kingnothing 16y ago

That looks like some extra long rant about nothing. What data does this guy want? You can pull out nearly everything about a user via Facebook's numerous APIs, if they grant sufficient permissions.

davidu 16y ago
Not email/phone/etc. And despite this, you can get email via hotmail or yahoo mail contacts integration. It's fairly a hypocritical position for Facebook to take.

dmvaldman 16y ago

I'm glad facebook doesn't give out the email addresses of friends to third parties without permission, and I am for their distinction between owning the friend list, but not their friends' data. The public seems to not have a consistent sense of privacy. They slam Facebook for being too open by not having a privacy setting enforced as the default, and then slam Facebook again when Facebook isn't advertising emails. Personally not a fan of all this hot air.

patrickaljord 16y ago
> I'm glad facebook doesn't give out the email addresses of friends to third parties without permission The problem is that they actually do with yahoo mail and hotmail http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234
spdy 16y ago
Mh why is it ok for yahoo and microsoft to access my friends email over an api but not for myself or a third party vendor (like google). http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-export-email-addresses-55247 http://searchengineland.com/facebook-you-have-no-right-to-ex... If i want to export all of my data out of facebook why cant i get these kind of informations?
_sh 16y ago
When I sign up to Facebook and use their contact list importer, they are using the private email addresses of my friends to link me into their network. When I export my social graph, Facebook will not return to me the email addresses I gave it when I signed up. Either way, all this bluster is a red herring. The article has it right: Facebook is outright lying when they claim this is about protecting its users--people who have explicitly agreed to include themselves in my social graph in the first place. It's about owning the social graph.

bretthellman 16y ago

They should have used the title "Facebook is lying"

chrischen 16y ago

I'm siding with Facebook on this. You can already get Facebook UIDs, which can be used to reconstruct the graph edges. You don't want to store Facebook UIDs? Build your own social graph. And Facebook is right. I own MY info on Facebook. I can prove it. I'll just delete my account with my email address. If you were my friend let's see if you still have acces to that info. If they start letting my friends export my email to third parties then I'm getting off Facebook. EDIT: Think about it. Most sites these days require an email. It's not exactly optional info to use Facebook. Are we seriously considering that it's acceptable that we let friends EXPORT people's email addresses for third parties just because they "friended" on Facebook? Maybe if there was a new "Share my email" feature this would be acceptable but "friending" != "here you can give my email to third parties and here's an easy API for you to do that"

robryan 16y ago
Your friends might not but Facebook sure will still have access to your email address.
- chrischen 16y ago
  I'm assuming they actually delete the info when I tell them to delete it. But in any case my friends won't have access to that info therefore it's not their right to export that info to others unless I give them permission to (which I won't).
  - sciboy 16y ago
    So you are saying that it's ok to export email addresses from gmail but not email addresses from facebook? Can you explain?
    - kmavm 16y ago
      Not to speak for GP, but that is a perfectly reasonable position to take, and one that I would take. They're different services; GMail does not have third-party apps in the same sense. Facebook's app ecosystem has some quite disreputable parties in it; an API that lets these parties have access to friends' email addresses would place a lot of Facebook users' emails in the hands of companies that they have no direct relationship with or knowledge of.

miratrix 16y ago

The problem is that Facebook's claiming that email is just another piece of metadata about a user. However, from Google's point of (and rest of the non-Facebook web), email is not a metadata, but the key identifier around which all of the services know which "John Smith" the given user is. If I'm building anything interesting and want to play outside the Facebook walled garden, the Facebook ID doesn't really get me anything - it's like someone giving me a currency from a random country that I never intend to visit. Unfortunately, even Facebook itself treats the email address as an identifier data (what do you need to use to log in to Facebook? Email address and password). It's a little disingenuous for them to turn that around and say that it's a metadata that's part of the user's profile, as opposed to the only unique, persistent, and widely used identifier that we currently have on the web.

chrischen 16y ago
Actually the facebook uid is very useful. Why else would facebook competitor.com need a friends email addresses but to spam them to sign up? If two people sign up with facebook data dumps you can still link them up via data dumps. Another useful feature is email hashed (dunno if it's still supported. But if you have someone's email you can connect compare email hashed so emails are never revealed.

danielnicollet 16y ago

This soo wrong. Arrington keeps using the word "friends" as if emails from your FB contacts were those of your actual friends. Imagine Arrington being able to turn 4000 "friends" on Facebook into a mass email list!!! No way! That just so wrong and I don't want that to happen. The premise under wich we befriend someone on Facebook just never included them being able to email you directly. In my case, it would be the last thing to happen before I quit FB entirely and stuff my account with bogus info or close it altogether.

patrickaljord 16y ago
The problem is that they actually do with yahoo mail and hotmail http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889234 or read the other posts on this threads.
andreyf 16y ago
I'm the opposite. If I facebook friended someone, I've most likely met them in person, and hence providing my virtual contact is quite all right. Facebook, in a way, is the place you say things to people you're likely to meet face-to-face. I'm not friends with Arrington on facebook, and wouldn't ever expect to be, although I'd probably follow him on twitter if any of my twitter-friends retweeted him. Yet, his e-mail is probably public knowledge. My point: it's all relative. To converge on a compatible set for all of these rules is social evolution.
DjDarkman 16y ago
So it's right to export your 4000 contacts from GMail and mass mail them, but it's wrong to do the same with Facebook. With GMail I can export everything and import it to an E-Mail client of my choosing, with Facebook this is impossible, if I join a new social network I have to do everything manually.
stoney 16y ago
As I understand it, taking a list of FB contacts and turning them into a mass email list would be a violation of the CAN-SPAM rules - people need to explicitly agree to be added to a mail list.

gojomo 16y ago

At both Gmail and Facebook, the most common way someone new winds up in your 'contacts' is they send you a message, and you somehow 'ack' that you want to maintain a link to them. (Or vice-versa.) From that point on, your view includes the email address they freely volunteered to you. That's the info anyone should be able to export. Facebook wanting to pretend that somehow, contact info shared between friends in their system can't go any further than Facebook is just a self-serving rationalization. Now, you don't have to show your email addresses to any or all friends on Facebook -- it's part of the privacy controls. So naturally if I don't show it to certain people, those people shouldn't be able to export it. And it's a nice feature of Facebook that me changing my privacy settings, or de-friending someone, essentially recalls my email from their contacts, unless they took special steps to copy it elsewhere earlier. But in the meantime, if I can see it, and copy & paste it, and use it to send messages, it's mine at that moment, even though Facebook may be holding it for me.

Derferman 16y ago

Facebook can't claim that "every person owns and controls his/her information" when the Graph API allows access (via friends permissions) to your friends' status, likes, notes, location, photos, relationships, checkins, website, groups, events, activities and birthdays[1]. In fact, the only information about your friends not available via friends permissions are email addresses and full streams. [1]: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...