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Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

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Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#51

Post by qjz »

kmavm wrote: post #7

Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "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 fro…

Here's my problem: Since when is my email address your information? Why is it okay for you to hand it over to a complete stranger, just so you can play Farmville? I understand that there's always a risk that my email address might become public, but when the recipient is responsible, it's a violation of trust.

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#52

Post by patrickaljord »

kmavm wrote: post #7

Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "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 fro…

> Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But a list of friends is useless without their emails or at least, their facebook ID which the dump doesn't give. Why can't you give a hash version of their friend's email?

Also, if I'm able to import emails from gmail or yahoo into facebook, I should be at least allowed to export those friends emails as it is proven that I already have them! If you allow users to import emails but you don't allow them to export those same emails, I'm sorry but that means Facebook is a closed silo.

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#53

Post by patrickaljord »

kmavm wrote: post #12
krschultz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is talking out of both sides of his mouth though. If Facebook exports a list of friends, what do you get? A list of names with no links? That isn't really useful. You either need email addresses or Facebook profile URLs to actually make a graph. What if your list is Billy Bob, Joe Smith, John Doe, and Mike Collins. How many of those are there are facebook? Dozens? Hundreds? It is meaningless. If Facebook exports a…

The graph API provides exactly what you are asking for. It doesn't provide friends' names , but FBIDs. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= ; is the user's profile, and http://graph.facebook.com/ ; is the public JSON for that ID. If you have an access token (on behalf of a logged in user), the graph API will also let you see other information for the user that you are entitled to see. Have you ever used a Facebook…

Why don't you provide that in your dump?

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#54

Post by wmf »

thwarted wrote: post #47
wmf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 som…

Obligatory DRM argument, check. But why even have privacy settings if you're not going to try to enforce them? Just make everything public, resulting in people hardly posting anything, and then the whole social networking thing can just shut down.

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#55

Post by powerje »

qjz wrote: post #51
kmavm wrote: post #7

Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "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 fro…

Here's my problem: Since when is my email address your information? Why is it okay for you to hand it over to a complete stranger, just so you can play Farmville? I understand that there's always a risk that my email address might become public, but when the recipient is responsible, it's a violation of trust.

Fine, then Facebook should give me the option to allow my friends (who I have approved one by one as such) to export my e-mail address. Why does Facebook not do even this much?

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#56

Post by rapind »

megaman821 wrote: post #28
plemer wrote: post #4

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.

In your analogy though does he say it with a (not so) hidden agenda?

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#57

Post by msg »

kmavm wrote: post #7

Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "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 fro…

As I said to you earlier, why can't I, the user, download whatever data my friends make available to me, subject to whatever privacy controls the data is already under and (perhaps) to load restrictions or resource availability?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887085

And this is the important point, I could do the same thing manually by visiting my friends' pages. So this is all about convenience for the customer, not about some crusading policy position.

If my friends don't want me to "mass export" "private" email addresses, they shouldn't leave them out where I can cut and paste them (and sell to 419 scammers, if I were the vengeful type). The same argument applies to all my friends' data.

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#58

Post by naner »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #29
naner wrote: post #23

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. Not really, exporting yo…

I think the difference is that if you email someone, most everyone understands that you're giving the user your email address and permission to email you back unless you use a disposable email address. Contrast that "knowledge" with facebook email addresses. How many people are really aware of whether or not their email on facebook is public, friend of friend, friend, etc? I suppose that's a separate usability and pr…

Contrast that "knowledge" with facebook email addresses. How many people are really aware of whether or not their email on facebook is public, friend of friend, friend, etc?

This doesn't mean that your gmail contacts are non-private. I could have a private email address that I only use with close friends and a public one I use for signing up for services and business correspondence, etc. This misuse of contact information has already happened to me. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows all about who I know even though I have never had an account just because a number of my friends have signed up and pulled in their contacts from gmail.

Your complaint seems more like an argument for not allowing address book importing at all by any services. Which makes sense, actually, since I don't think address book exporting was meant to be sucked up by social networking services. It was meant to allow you to take your address book with you if you wanted to change email services.

And gmail doesn't want access to your friends list so they can import it into gmail, they want it for their forthcoming social networking product.

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#59

Post by thwarted »

wmf wrote: post #54
thwarted wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Obligatory DRM argument, check. But why even have privacy settings if you're not going to try to enforce them? Just make everything public, resulting in people hardly posting anything, and then the whole social networking thing can just shut down.

My point is that the DRM-style argument can't work because bits can't be restricted in this manner.

I mean, I'm still trying to figure out what "look but don't re-share" means. There's absolutely no way to enforce that.

Facebook saying that they are honoring user's settings is a false sense of security, because your address is accessible to me via my email program, that's how I was able to give it to facebook. I can still use your email address I already had for any purpose.

The only people their policy protects is people you friended on facebook without using email address book integration, but that's not the topic here.

I suppose if the false sense of security gets people to use your website, you can exploit that, but that doesn't mean you can actually enforce it. And somehow I doubt people's email addresses being exposed via facebook is going to keep the majority of people from using facebook: everyone already gets spam, and most people don't know how to track how an email address ends up in spamming lists. Facebook may already be selling email addresses to spammers and most people would never know.

It's actually in facebook's interest to sell email addresses rather than expose email addresses to third party apps that contact you via facebook, because third party apps that contact you via facebook reflect badly on facebook's other (maybe legit) emails that come from facebook's servers/domains.

Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”

#60

Post by quaesitum »

kmavm wrote: post #7

Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "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 fro…

Facebook is being completely two-faced about this. They're obfuscating the situation by turning this into a matter of "Google-owns-mail," whereas "Facebook-owns-contacts". In other words, Facebook's stance is that users own contacts in Facebook, meanwhile users own email addresses in Gmail. The truth is: all this really boils down to is email addresses and nothing else. If you said, "No duh!" to that last sentence and you're still siding with Facebook, re-read that last sentence again and think about it. Let me explain.

According to Facebook: Facebook can get email addresses from Google, but Google cannot get email addresses from Facebook.

Huh, does this sound fair?

I see the gears in your are head turning, stop thinking about this as a matter of "Gmail users own email" vs "Facebook users own contact lists."

That Facebook argument is fallacious because it's a lot like saying, "If Google were to deal drugs, it'd be okay for Facebook to acquire said drugs from Google. On the other hand, it would be oh-so-bad for society if Facebook were to sell drugs, when they're actually in the matchmaking business." Whether or not it's morally reprehensible to distribute drugs, at least one's stance on the matter should be consistent. Don't insult a user's intelligence by turning this into a matter of business and occupation, which is what they're doing. This is a matter of email-contacts between parties A and B, and nothing more.

I don't think Google is as open as they COULD be, but they have a long history of doing a helluva lot better job than Facebook.

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