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I'll admit that I'm deeply biased by being a Facebook intern, but why is Data Liberation better than the equivalent feature on Facebook?

by thurn 15y ago

Shenglong 15y ago
Because we're actually aware of it. I've been using Facebook since 2006, and I've never heard of such a feature on Facebook... and I know all about privacy settings and other features. Does Facebook actually have an export feature?
- kmavm 15y ago
  Account settings -> Security -> 'Click here to download a copy of the data you've put on Facebook.' This downloads a .zip file with a static html human-browsable index of all your photos, notes, posts, friends' names, etc.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    Does it download your friends' public email addresses and phone numbers? If no, why not?
    - rufibarbatus 15y ago
      No. Facebook's explanation is that because they respect your privacy, they think you should be able to withdraw access to contact information whenever you see fit. In order for that to work, it goes, your friends should only be able to access contact information from within FB's walled garden, and never be able to export it. (Also the reason contact scraping Apps are met with cease and desist letters.) BTW, you can export your friends' birthdays from the events page. This data is not included in the aforementioned bundle.
    - unicornporn 15y ago
      That is where this [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 ] extension entered.
  - esrauch 15y ago
    First of all, this feature is sufficiently buried that when I looked around for it a couple days ago I was convinced that it simply didn't exist (though honestly it's not that buried, it's just not where I would expect it). It didn't allow me to download my information, it said I should receive an email when I can (it's "gathering") and after 25 minutes the email hasn't been sent. Honestly, even if the zip has exactly what I want in it, that is an unacceptable experience. I created a yahoo account just so I could link it to my facebook account and export the contacts from yahoo. If linking to a third party and exporting from there is more straightforward than exporting the data directly there is something seriously wrong. Secondly, I only want my contact information, why can I not get just it? If I was on a limited bandwidth connection or I had to pay per byte in particular it is completely absurd that I have to download everything that I don't care about to get what I do care about. There is also the point that the facebook experience feels adversarial for some things. Sure they had almost exactly the same feature as Circles for a long time, but how many people ever used it? When I was using it it feels more like some VP at facebook was like "I guess we have to include this feature, but it will hurt our bottom line if too many people start using it so we should make it sufficiently complex and buried that no one uses it while still being available so that if anyone complains about the lack of security features we can point at the fact that it technically exists". Exporting data seems to have followed exactly the same line of thinking. My last comment I will be unable to actually confirm until I am able to see what they are exporting, but if it is not in a format that I can import to gmail contacts (it supports several formats from major vendors) then it is worse than useless to me since it made me waste all this time to get something that isn't in a usable format. I'll update this comment either way when I am able to actually access the information that I requested.
  - esrauch 15y ago
    I can't actually edit the post because its been too long. Just got the link, took over 3 hours and its an almost 100MB zip file (compare that to the ~50kb of actual data that I was interested in exporting). The actual stuff has none of the stuff that I would actually want to export (my friends email addresses and phone numbers are not included), the photos aren't the originals that I uploaded (which I would actually like since I lost some of the higher resolution copies) and absolutely nothing is in a format that would be useful for using the data in another website. That is the entire point of data liberation; this is just allowing you to store facebook so you can view it without an internet connection. That is not at all what Google's data liberation or Yahoo!s export features do; they actually give you the information you want in a format that would allow you to use it with one of their competitors. I hope that this post didn't sound too negative, Facebook is really a quality website in general and it's probably a great place to work, but the export feature is pretty clearly intentionally set up in a way that would make it impossible to use in any meaningful way. It is only very marginally different than doing a file > save page as in your browser. It's actually the perfect example of how opposed Facebook is to what Google is pushing when it talks about data liberation.
rufibarbatus 15y ago
This is actually a fair question. I expected more from Google. Right now, the only better thing about Google's data liberation is that you get to export your contact information from it like any sane platform should let you. But I expected more from Google than the weird, often non-standardized zip bonanza they're currently offering. Right now, both Google and Facebook's "data liberation" solutions are bad and have a lot of place for improvement.

I'll admit that I'm deeply biased by being a Facebook intern, but why is Data Liberation better than the equivalent feature on Facebook?

by thurn 15y ago

I'll admit that I'm deeply biased by being a Facebook intern, but why is Data Liberation better than the equivalent feature on Facebook?

Shenglong 15y ago

Because we're actually aware of it. I've been using Facebook since 2006, and I've never heard of such a feature on Facebook... and I know all about privacy settings and other features. Does Facebook actually have an export feature?

kmavm 15y ago
Account settings -> Security -> 'Click here to download a copy of the data you've put on Facebook.' This downloads a .zip file with a static html human-browsable index of all your photos, notes, posts, friends' names, etc.
- bad_user 15y ago
  Does it download your friends' public email addresses and phone numbers? If no, why not?
  - rufibarbatus 15y ago
    No. Facebook's explanation is that because they respect your privacy, they think you should be able to withdraw access to contact information whenever you see fit. In order for that to work, it goes, your friends should only be able to access contact information from within FB's walled garden, and never be able to export it. (Also the reason contact scraping Apps are met with cease and desist letters.) BTW, you can export your friends' birthdays from the events page. This data is not included in the aforementioned bundle.
  - unicornporn 15y ago
    That is where this [ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729084 ] extension entered.
- esrauch 15y ago
  First of all, this feature is sufficiently buried that when I looked around for it a couple days ago I was convinced that it simply didn't exist (though honestly it's not that buried, it's just not where I would expect it). It didn't allow me to download my information, it said I should receive an email when I can (it's "gathering") and after 25 minutes the email hasn't been sent. Honestly, even if the zip has exactly what I want in it, that is an unacceptable experience. I created a yahoo account just so I could link it to my facebook account and export the contacts from yahoo. If linking to a third party and exporting from there is more straightforward than exporting the data directly there is something seriously wrong. Secondly, I only want my contact information, why can I not get just it? If I was on a limited bandwidth connection or I had to pay per byte in particular it is completely absurd that I have to download everything that I don't care about to get what I do care about. There is also the point that the facebook experience feels adversarial for some things. Sure they had almost exactly the same feature as Circles for a long time, but how many people ever used it? When I was using it it feels more like some VP at facebook was like "I guess we have to include this feature, but it will hurt our bottom line if too many people start using it so we should make it sufficiently complex and buried that no one uses it while still being available so that if anyone complains about the lack of security features we can point at the fact that it technically exists". Exporting data seems to have followed exactly the same line of thinking. My last comment I will be unable to actually confirm until I am able to see what they are exporting, but if it is not in a format that I can import to gmail contacts (it supports several formats from major vendors) then it is worse than useless to me since it made me waste all this time to get something that isn't in a usable format. I'll update this comment either way when I am able to actually access the information that I requested.
- esrauch 15y ago
  I can't actually edit the post because its been too long. Just got the link, took over 3 hours and its an almost 100MB zip file (compare that to the ~50kb of actual data that I was interested in exporting). The actual stuff has none of the stuff that I would actually want to export (my friends email addresses and phone numbers are not included), the photos aren't the originals that I uploaded (which I would actually like since I lost some of the higher resolution copies) and absolutely nothing is in a format that would be useful for using the data in another website. That is the entire point of data liberation; this is just allowing you to store facebook so you can view it without an internet connection. That is not at all what Google's data liberation or Yahoo!s export features do; they actually give you the information you want in a format that would allow you to use it with one of their competitors. I hope that this post didn't sound too negative, Facebook is really a quality website in general and it's probably a great place to work, but the export feature is pretty clearly intentionally set up in a way that would make it impossible to use in any meaningful way. It is only very marginally different than doing a file > save page as in your browser. It's actually the perfect example of how opposed Facebook is to what Google is pushing when it talks about data liberation.

rufibarbatus 15y ago

This is actually a fair question. I expected more from Google. Right now, the only better thing about Google's data liberation is that you get to export your contact information from it like any sane platform should let you. But I expected more from Google than the weird, often non-standardized zip bonanza they're currently offering. Right now, both Google and Facebook's "data liberation" solutions are bad and have a lot of place for improvement.