Comment by illumin8

16 years ago

The warning says: "Here’s the not-so-fine print. You have been directed to this page from a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends."

I think this is misleading - Doesn't Facebook allow you to download all of your data, just like Google? As much as I dislike Facebook's privacy policies, the mudslinging seems a little thick from both sides.

Facebook and Google - two of the biggest privacy violating companies on the planet. May you live in interesting times, indeed.

10 comments

illumin8

Reply
nkassis  16 years ago

Facebook to my knowledge does not let you export your friends email addresses in a way that they could be synced with your email service. I think that if they did, it would be beneficial to everyone. Their claim that email addresses are private is bogus. They could add buttons to the privacy settings that would allow a user to block their email from being access by friends. There is no valid, as in non anti competitive, reason to hold on to names and email of your Facebook friends.

I'm just waiting for Facebook to release a real email service ala gmail in the near future to escalate this battle.

  • salvadors  16 years ago

    You can export your friends' email addresses from Facebook to sites that they have a deal with - e.g. Yahoo Mail.

    You can then export from there as CSV etc., and pull them into other services. I set up a one-time Ymail account just to try this out, and it worked just fine.

    So any claims by Facebook that they can't do this due to users' privacy etc are completely bogus. It's just that Google won't give them money to do it.

  • NolF  16 years ago

    There already is an option not to show your email to friends. Just set the email field to 'Only Me'.

    • roll  16 years ago

      It does not apply to export, only allows or forbids display your email to your "friend"

  • fragmede  16 years ago

    How much 'real-er' does FB messaging need to get?

    I ask because FB messaging, like Gmail, is already available on the two platforms that matter today - web browsers and smartphones. Yeah, you need a FB account to use FB messaging, but if you don't have Facebook, you're not a real person, at least according to Quora (along with any other FB-connect only site). (Quora has since backpedaled on that stance.)

    The obvious interoperability move - letting you reply-by-email to FB messages is something they'll never do, because it means you don't have to sign into FB, which they can't have.

    • riffraff  16 years ago

      well, they could add categorization/labels for one.

      Or more concretly: the ability to receive messages from people you don't already have as contacts.

cpr  16 years ago

No, you can't get your "friends"' email info out.