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User choice is the problem here - I should be able to choose whether or not apps that my friends use can access my contact information, not Facebook. And in fa

User choice is the problem here - I should be able to choose whether or not apps that my friends use can access my contact information, not Facebook. And in fact, there already is an extremely fine grained control panel managing what kind of information the apps my friends use can access (18 different toggles), from my bio to my location to the content of my status updates. The one thing that I'm not allowed to expose to those apps? My contact information. For my protection my ass. I just can't believe that's about protecting my privacy, considering they encourage me at every step to pass every other piece of my Facebook presence around like the village bicycle.

chrischen 16y ago
You can expose your contact info to third parties: just connect with the app. The only thing you can't do is expose your friends contact info to third party apps.
- ewjordan 16y ago
  Every other piece of information that Facebook has on me is allowed to be exposed to my friends' apps without me personally connecting with the app. The motivation here is crystal clear: e-mail addresses function as (essentially) UIDs on the web as a whole, and someone like Google has billions of these e-mail addresses laying around. But since people started managing parts of their social graphs on Facebook instead of through (say) Gmail, Google's edge graph is starting to get stale. Facebook is terrified of the idea that Google could connect all the Gmail-to-Gmail edges without finding every one of those users. In order for Google to refresh that graph without e-mail addresses, they'd need every involved user to export their Facebook UID out of Facebook - if I didn't do this myself, then despite the fact that (say) 30 of my Facebook friends are on Gmail, even if every one of them exported from Facebook to Google, Google could never match my Facebook UID to my Google account. If they were able to match e-mail addresses, they could probably reconstruct a very healthy proportion of the edges (almost every edge that has a Gmail user at both vertices) even if only a small proportion of initial users seeded the graph by exporting their own data; further, when Google got an edge (suppose my friend exported his data, and my Gmail address matched), they could follow up with that edge, knowing that they are also Facebook users, and suggest that they export their data as well, which would lead to blisteringly fast filling out of that tree. To anyone that doesn't already have a huge userbase, this is not a big deal, but to anyone that does, it's the difference between having effectively zero access to the social graph and being able to reconstruct your users intersection with it with almost perfect resolution.
  - chrischen 16y ago
    > Every other piece of information that Facebook has on me is allowed to be exposed to my friends' apps without me personally connecting with the app. Really? Because I'd love to grab that information for my app. Are you talking about the publicly available information? > The motivation here is crystal clear: e-mail addresses function as (essentially) UIDs on the web as a whole, and someone like Google has billions of these e-mail addresses laying around. But since people started managing parts of their social graphs on Facebook instead of through (say) Gmail, Google's edge graph is starting to get stale. Facebook is terrified of the idea that Google could connect all the Gmail-to-Gmail edges without finding every one of those users. Sure Facebook probably wouldn't want to do that even if there wasn't a privacy issue with letting friends export friends' email addresses. But I don't care about that, I just don't want them to let my friends export my email, and I don't think they have to create that feature. That feature would help google and other sites ride on Facebook's success at the expense of user privacy. I don't care about the former and I would be on Google's side if it were just the former issue but it is not. > In order for Google to refresh that graph without e-mail addresses, they'd need every involved user to export their Facebook UID out of Facebook - if I didn't do this myself, then despite the fact that (say) 30 of my Facebook friends are on Gmail, even if every one of them exported from Facebook to Google, Google could never match my Facebook UID to my Google account. > To anyone that doesn't already have a huge userbase, this is not a big deal, but to anyone that does, it's the difference between having effectively zero access to the social graph and being able to reconstruct your users intersection with it with almost perfect resolution. Last time I checked (may have changed) Facebook let's you query email hashes to find the person's friends based on the email hash. Also YOU created those networks on Facebook. Why would you expect Google to magically know that? Sure google is trustworthy, but more importantly why would you want malicious third party site to know your email address? I would love for Facebook make it really easy for sites to use their graph data as easily as possible but Facebook already does this. The people complaining probably haven't even seen the Facebook APIs or even used Facebook. They're just complaining because bashing Facebook for controlling its data is the popular thing to do right now.

chrischen 16y ago

You can expose your contact info to third parties: just connect with the app. The only thing you can't do is expose your friends contact info to third party apps.

ewjordan 16y ago
Every other piece of information that Facebook has on me is allowed to be exposed to my friends' apps without me personally connecting with the app. The motivation here is crystal clear: e-mail addresses function as (essentially) UIDs on the web as a whole, and someone like Google has billions of these e-mail addresses laying around. But since people started managing parts of their social graphs on Facebook instead of through (say) Gmail, Google's edge graph is starting to get stale. Facebook is terrified of the idea that Google could connect all the Gmail-to-Gmail edges without finding every one of those users. In order for Google to refresh that graph without e-mail addresses, they'd need every involved user to export their Facebook UID out of Facebook - if I didn't do this myself, then despite the fact that (say) 30 of my Facebook friends are on Gmail, even if every one of them exported from Facebook to Google, Google could never match my Facebook UID to my Google account. If they were able to match e-mail addresses, they could probably reconstruct a very healthy proportion of the edges (almost every edge that has a Gmail user at both vertices) even if only a small proportion of initial users seeded the graph by exporting their own data; further, when Google got an edge (suppose my friend exported his data, and my Gmail address matched), they could follow up with that edge, knowing that they are also Facebook users, and suggest that they export their data as well, which would lead to blisteringly fast filling out of that tree. To anyone that doesn't already have a huge userbase, this is not a big deal, but to anyone that does, it's the difference between having effectively zero access to the social graph and being able to reconstruct your users intersection with it with almost perfect resolution.
- chrischen 16y ago
  > Every other piece of information that Facebook has on me is allowed to be exposed to my friends' apps without me personally connecting with the app. Really? Because I'd love to grab that information for my app. Are you talking about the publicly available information? > The motivation here is crystal clear: e-mail addresses function as (essentially) UIDs on the web as a whole, and someone like Google has billions of these e-mail addresses laying around. But since people started managing parts of their social graphs on Facebook instead of through (say) Gmail, Google's edge graph is starting to get stale. Facebook is terrified of the idea that Google could connect all the Gmail-to-Gmail edges without finding every one of those users. Sure Facebook probably wouldn't want to do that even if there wasn't a privacy issue with letting friends export friends' email addresses. But I don't care about that, I just don't want them to let my friends export my email, and I don't think they have to create that feature. That feature would help google and other sites ride on Facebook's success at the expense of user privacy. I don't care about the former and I would be on Google's side if it were just the former issue but it is not. > In order for Google to refresh that graph without e-mail addresses, they'd need every involved user to export their Facebook UID out of Facebook - if I didn't do this myself, then despite the fact that (say) 30 of my Facebook friends are on Gmail, even if every one of them exported from Facebook to Google, Google could never match my Facebook UID to my Google account. > To anyone that doesn't already have a huge userbase, this is not a big deal, but to anyone that does, it's the difference between having effectively zero access to the social graph and being able to reconstruct your users intersection with it with almost perfect resolution. Last time I checked (may have changed) Facebook let's you query email hashes to find the person's friends based on the email hash. Also YOU created those networks on Facebook. Why would you expect Google to magically know that? Sure google is trustworthy, but more importantly why would you want malicious third party site to know your email address? I would love for Facebook make it really easy for sites to use their graph data as easily as possible but Facebook already does this. The people complaining probably haven't even seen the Facebook APIs or even used Facebook. They're just complaining because bashing Facebook for controlling its data is the popular thing to do right now.