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Can't you import friends by downloading your friends list using the facebook export tool? Google can use that to match people up with their friends as long as their friends have opted into Google+ with their facebook UID too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If the data disappears from the page, how do you have personal access to it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
then someone should make an extension (or webapp) that walks you through creating the throwaway yahoo account and moving everything into G+.
I believe automating any part of the sign up process with Yahoo! is against the 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.
> The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.
> Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/googles-response-to-faceboo...
So the way they're construing this, contact information is not your data to begin with, but rather someone else's data which you've been granted (perfectly revokable) access to. I don't know if this holds in court, but I'm pretty sure no one will bother bringing this to court to find out.
I think this is just pissing users off. I want to import my contacts into Google+, but I currently have no desire to leave Facebook. After seeing this, that changes a bit.
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.
You can play it out in court if the judge is favourable with this case: Since Facebook has allowed viewing emails for many years, there's a reasonable expectation that emails will always be there. By suddenly doing attempts to circumvent a tool, they could run afoul of; de facto false advertising (the author stated that the use was allowed since 2010) or anti-trust/monopoly laws by abusing their monopoly against new competition.
However, Facebook could whip out their ToS and point out that his extension is illegal as noted buried somewhere deep in the legalese. Or something else.
Even though I'm IANAL, this isn't clear cut to me either.
G+ should allow you to import your Facebook data if you download it using Facebook's own export tool.
G+ should allow you to import your Facebook data if you download it using Facebook's own export tool.
Go to your google account settings, and there is an option called "Connected accounts". Facebook is listed there. I don't know what this actually does however.
I am going to start off by saying I haven't read the article. With that said, didn't Google deny Facebook from scraping contacts off of gmail a year (or two) ago? I forget the exact method they implemented, but I know it stunted Facebook's ability to scrape the emails for a good while. How is this any different?
Facebook's argument has always been that it doesn't think you have the right to export your friends' contact information (or at least, they're endlessly pondering whether you have that right). Which is a ridiculous argument, because, as has been mentioned elsewhere, they already allow Yahoo Mail users to do exactly that.