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Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

zdnet.com

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Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#81

Post by Silhouette »

roldon332 wrote: post #80
Silhouette wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are confusing trust with the right to have an address book. And most of the people in this discussion are confusing the right to have an address book (which you control and to which only you have access) with giving someone else's personal data to Google (a global giant that would squish you like a bug if it meant a 0.001% increase in its data mining efficiency, with absolutely no loyalty to either you or the p…

So google is going to sell me out? But facebook isn't? What about Verizon? How do you know what companies to trust with private information?

That's not the point. Your friend made a decision to share their private data with you using Facebook, knowing that it was Facebook that would be holding the sensitive data. You are talking about sharing that data with other organisations, which your friend has no control over. The point isn't whether or not you trust those organisations, it's whether it's abusing the privilege of having access to your friend's data to spread that data around where they don't control it any more. I think doing so is, at best, a betrayal of confidence.

(Edit: And in answer to your other question, about which organisations I personally can trust, we have fairly strict laws in my country about privacy and data protection, which limit what any of these companies may legally do and give me various rights with regard to any personally identifiable data anyone holds about me. I don't think those laws go far enough, but IMHO they're certainly better than the free-for-all you seem to want. So I can have some confidence in how my data will be handled by any company operating in our jurisdiction, which immediately makes me more likely to trust them than US-based companies like Facebook and Google whose business models fundamentally rely on undermining privacy in ways that are rarely going to be in the interests of the exposed.)

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#83

Post by Silhouette »

chc wrote: post #79
Silhouette wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not my friends I don't trust, it's Google.

Then you should ask your friends not to enter your info into their Gmail address books, and only give your info to you people you trust to honor that request. That's where the trust comes in. If you give your info to people, you must trust that they will not misuse it, whatever "misuse" means to you. Google's import tool would not sneak onto your friends' computers at night and surreptitiously import your data agains…

> Facebook blocking one method for one company to import your data is not security; it's just corporate warfare.

Oh, I realise that. And I realise that some companies are necessarily going to get access to some basic contact information like e-mail addresses anyway if they are also in the e-mail business, because we all use mail services for e-mail to work. The fact that Google are in both the e-mail service business and the data mining business is an unfortunate coincidence in this respect, as far as I'm concerned.

I guess I just don't think it's healthy that in 2011, with all the data mining and all the poor security and genuinely harmful consequences of leaks going on, we still rely on things like unencrypted communication and centralised service providers who have direct access to personal data. We can do better now, and we would collectively be significantly safer and probably significantly happier as well if we did. Swapping Facebook spying on your entire life for Google does not seem like a particularly constructive move in that context.

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#84

Post by alex_c »

Silhouette wrote: post #72
sorbus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if one of them wanted to take their phone number off the site? What if one of them wanted to hide their information from you specifically? If you've downloaded it already you're depriving them of the right to control their own data. Consider how ridiculous that would sound if you asked "What if one of your friends had emailed you their phone number and wanted to remove your access to it (or had emailed you and…

You never tell your friends secrets in real life, and trust them not to tell the rest of the world?

If they do, I'll be pissed at them, not at the technology they use to share my secrets.

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#85

Post by nitrogen »

Silhouette wrote: post #72
sorbus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if one of them wanted to take their phone number off the site? What if one of them wanted to hide their information from you specifically? If you've downloaded it already you're depriving them of the right to control their own data. Consider how ridiculous that would sound if you asked "What if one of your friends had emailed you their phone number and wanted to remove your access to it (or had emailed you and…

You never tell your friends secrets in real life, and trust them not to tell the rest of the world?

That is unrelated to an issue that essentially amounts to adding your friends' phone numbers (phone numbers they already made available to you) to your new address book when you get a new phone.

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#86

Post by Silhouette »

alex_c wrote: post #84
Silhouette wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never tell your friends secrets in real life, and trust them not to tell the rest of the world?

If they do, I'll be pissed at them, not at the technology they use to share my secrets.

But you don't have a problem with them sharing your information with anyone as long as it's a technology provider? Even if that technology provider has a fundamental interest in abusing that access and using your data for purposes far beyond than what you or your friend ever intended?

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#87

Post by icebraining »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #23
bad_user wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

What if they use it to, you know, email you and by doing that they give it to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo or even some shady mail provider they use?

I don't really see the difference.

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#88

Post by icebraining »

Silhouette wrote: post #78
chc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this isn't a random business. They decided, intentionally, that they wanted to put your personal information in there. True story: I have manually entered personal information (name, email, birthday, phone number) for many of my friends into my email accounts' address books over the years. They have done the same to me. It's expected. That's what I was saying: If you're going to let people see all your personal i…

It's not my friends I don't trust, it's Google.

You don't have friends using Gmail?

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#89

Post by Silhouette »

nitrogen wrote: post #85
Silhouette wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never tell your friends secrets in real life, and trust them not to tell the rest of the world?

That is unrelated to an issue that essentially amounts to adding your friends' phone numbers (phone numbers they already made available to you) to your new address book when you get a new phone.

> That is unrelated

Not if Google subsequently decide to make your information available more widely than it was originally, it's not -- and I would remind you that several of the Internet giants, including both Google and Facebook, have faced heavy criticism for deliberately doing exactly that in the not-so-distant past.

Re: Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends

#90

Post by Silhouette »

icebraining wrote: post #88
Silhouette wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not my friends I don't trust, it's Google.

You don't have friends using Gmail?

I do, and I dislike immensely the fact that this means Google may be data mining personal messages I send privately to friends and I have no way to no or avoid it.

This is one reason all personal communications over the Internet should long since have defaulted to encryption. I don't mind Google offering a useful service, but there's really no (technical) need for them to have access to all that data while they're doing it.

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