6 ms·

Actually they did not restrict the access to your own data, but to a specific method of accessing them. Which, I am quite sure, is no legal issue for anybody

• bad_user 15y ago
  Yes, but you know, I have ~ 122 friends. And I invited like 40 of them to join Facebook. Now, those 122 friends are fully aware that their public email addresses and phone numbers are available to me. Those that do not want this, should not publish their emails or phone numbers or should not befriend me. What Facebook is doing here is to make it hard to export my list of friends to other places, like Google's contacts or my own phone's contacts list or Google+ or whatever. I have to go over each of those 122 acquaintances and copy/paste their data manually. What they are doing is definitely not illegal, but on the other hand I dislike Facebook so much that I'm willing to switch to a competitor that already engages in anti-competitive behavior by means of their near-monopoly, but that knows how to treat my own data.
  • UtestMe 15y ago
    I would't be that confident Google will properly herd out contacts, eventually... It happened before with Android's openness, it can happen again with G+
  • MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    I disagree that it is your data. If I befriend you on Facebook I am not giving you permission to bulk import my information into any old website which may or may not treat that information respectfully. People are focused on Google but forget that if they enabled this your information could be bulk imported into schemy websites who only want the data to spam. Even if those applications get banned it's too late if you're the one getting spammed and your information sold to other spam lists. The key here is that Facebook relationships are not people you trust. They are people you kind sorta know. That doesn't imply that they are trustworthy enough to hand over your personal information to do whatever they wish with.
    • chc 15y ago
      Don't fool yourself. If they're not that trustworthy, you shouldn't be friending them, because preventing known Chrome extensions from doing this does not prevent the other 5000 ways (including a pen and paper) of doing the same thing.
      • MatthewPhillips 15y ago
        If I only befriended people I trust with my personal data my profile would have a half a dozen friends, or less. Making it difficult for people to do something stupid is a superior strategy to making it easy for them to do so.
        • Flenser 15y ago
          If you only trust 6 people to have access to your email address then customise Facebook's privacy settings to only let those people see it. You don't have to trade data security for access to friends. Facebook can't protect you from every way your friends could mishandle the data you give them access to. If you don't want them to have access to part of your profile it's up to you to set your privacy permissions appropriately, and it's Facebook's responsibility to make that as easy as possible (which they haven't).
      • Silhouette 15y ago
        I would be offended if my friends started giving out my personal details to random businesses using a pen and paper, too. I don't personally use Facebook, having abandoned it almost immediately precisely because my friends were collectively volunteering all kinds of information that I considered private. Today, my friends know this is my view and it's not a problem, nor am I the only one of my group who takes this view. Obviously it took a while before my views became known, though. In any case, this whole black-and-white idea that if you volunteer any personal information to friends on one service with privacy controls you might trust then that information is fair game for anyone to give to anyone else is just silly. If it weren't, Facebook themselves wouldn't have been pressured repeatedly into creating and maintaining all those privacy controls even though it's not really in their interests to do so and they've tried to reduce them again and failed on several occasions.