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Any legal eagles here on HN care to comment on the legality of this? I would have hoped that data protection laws (I'm in the UK) would have protected this, since it provides me with access to my own data.
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
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.
I managed to use it to export my contacts about an hour ago. Successfully imported them in to Gmail and G+. Strange. I highly doubt that it is illegal, but it certainly breaks FB's TOS.
Any legal eagles here on HN care to comment on the legality of this? I would have hoped that data protection laws (I'm in the UK) would have protected this, since it provides me with access to my own data.
I doubt there's a legal issue here, just grubby, low-brow behaviour, which is basically par for the course for Facebook.
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
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 contact…
Any legal eagles here on HN care to comment on the legality of this? I would have hoped that data protection laws (I'm in the UK) would have protected this, since it provides me with access to my own data.
Data Protection wouldn't cover this. They're keeping the data securely, and you have personal access to it. Data Protection doesn't stipulate that you must be able to easily export your data to rival services, I'm afraid.
Any legal eagles here on HN care to comment on the legality of this? I would have hoped that data protection laws (I'm in the UK) would have protected this, since it provides me with access to my own data.
The 1998 data protection act is about data relating to you - the data of your friends would not be covered (obviously it would be covered for them). Even for that data, while the (British) law states that people must be able to claim the information stored about them, they have to submit a request, and the company is allowed to charge a small fee. So, no, the data protection act isn't relevant.
This has been demonstrated a few times in court but I can't be bothered to dig around for references.
Any legal eagles here on HN care to comment on the legality of this? I would have hoped that data protection laws (I'm in the UK) would have protected this, since it provides me with access to my own data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt there's a legal issue here, just grubby, low-brow behaviour, which is basically par for the course for Facebook.
...you mean par for the course for large, powerful companies with a lot to lose.