41–50 of 69 posts
Can a comment on the tech crunch blog by one of the Facebook engineers be taken as an official Facebook position?
I cannot think of a less appropriate organization to declare this exact criticism.
I don't get why people have such a problem with this. If Hitler says genocide is wrong, does the fact that it came from Hitler make it any less true. The arguments put forth either stand on their own or they don't. The fact that they came from a Facebook engineer is irrelevant.
He's explicitly accusing Google of committing a crime they didn't commit, even as he himself is guilty of it.
So their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but only as long as we both use Facebook?" That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.
The theory is that by accepting someone's friend request you're not automatically granting them the ability to export your email address to any application that asks for it. If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. I know of no social network, including Google's own Orkut, Twitter, and Myspace, which allows this kind of mass exportation of frie…
Apps like, um, FaceBook?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The theory is that by accepting someone's friend request you're not automatically granting them the ability to export your email address to any application that asks for it. If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. I know of no social network, including Google's own Orkut, Twitter, and Myspace, which allows this kind of mass exportation of frie…
> If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. Apps like, um, FaceBook?
So their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but only as long as we both use Facebook?" That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.
A slightly different way to look at it is "I share some of my contact info with you as long as I can control how you use it (e.g. look but don't re-share, I can revoke it later, etc.)." Facebook allows that kind of control by preventing data export.
In other words, "If everyone uses Facebook for their data control needs, we'd all have perfect data control."
This sounds suspiciously like an argument for DRM, which all end up failing and being bogus. Remember those email client plugins that would keep people from printing or remailing an email, that would have only worked if just everyone you sent something to had it installed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it were possible there's a good chance your inbox would quickly be filled with spam from apps your friends use. Apps like, um, FaceBook?
More like Zynga apps. Could you imagine if Farmville could easily get a hold of the emails of all of your friends? God help us.
Before I joined FaceBook I would get regular emails about all of my friends on FB that had uploaded my contact info via GMail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why people have such a problem with this. If Hitler says genocide is wrong, does the fact that it came from Hitler make it any less true. The arguments put forth either stand on their own or they don't. The fact that they came from a Facebook engineer is irrelevant.
Google is not on trial here. As Facebook showed, my data in Google is totally available to me should I need it. He's explicitly accusing Google of committing a crime they didn't commit, even as he himself is guilty of it.