
Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient” - michaelhart
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/facebook-slaps-google-openness-doesnt-mean-being-open-when-its-convenient/
======
neilk
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.

~~~
yariv
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 friend emails via its API.

~~~
nostromo
> 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?

~~~
gilted
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.

~~~
nostromo
My only point is that the scenario yariv frets about is exactly what FaceBook
did to grow.

Before I joined FaceBook I would get regular emails about all of my friends on
FB that had uploaded my contact info via GMail.

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bradhe
You mean Facebook, the company that has had a pretty rough PR year thanks to
its deceptive privacy policies and practices?

~~~
btilly
Hey, a failure to respect privacy is just direct evidence of openness, right?

(Disclaimer. I may be biased by working for Google. But I'm also not opposed
to switching from a BSD to GPL strategy to encourage freedom.)

~~~
kmavm
Laugh while you can. During the Buzz launch, I recall Google found it just as
hard to negotiate the intrinsically tricky balance between privacy and
openness. There is a real trade-off between the two in products that allow you
to share information with groups larger than one.

Good luck with your new social product.

~~~
btilly
I'm fully aware of this. However I happen to personally believe that Google's
missteps have been far less than Facebook's - and less intentional.

I'm sure that both companies will continue to fail to find the perfect
balance. I'm strongly inclined to believe that Google will fail less. (However
people will continue to hold us to a higher standard.)

~~~
kmavm
> less intentional.

I'd refer you to Hanlon's Razor. You might also want to introspect as to why
the singular social privacy fiasco whose decision-making you've seen
internally strikes you as less evil than the privacy fiascos you've witnessed
as an outsider.

Also, life is long, and the valley is small. We may work together someday.
Let's try to presume good faith when possible, eh?

~~~
btilly
On intentionality, I find myself in agreement with a lot of what
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_says_the_age_of_privacy_is_ov.php)
has to say. Facebook acquired a lot of data when everything was promised to be
private, then changed the rules on people. Repeatedly. And Zuckerberg has been
privately cavalier about his responsibility to respect privacy from the start,
as is evidenced by [http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-
ims...](http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-
help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5).

This does not mean to say that most, or even very many, people working at
Facebook are as morally challenged as Zuckerberg seems to me to be. But the
fact that I think that some of Facebook's controversial decisions come from
Zuckerberg, and that I don't think Zuckerberg is acting in good faith, is why
I view various incidents involving Facebook as being more evil.

As for the valley being small, it is but I don't live there. And it seems
unlikely that I will ever live there. Furthermore my feelings about any
particular company don't generally extend to the rank and file working there.
Similarly I don't let my hatred of Microsoft's policies get in the way of my
having friendships with people who work at, or used to work at, Microsoft.

~~~
kmavm
Sorry for any perceived "valley-centrism"; feel free to substitute "small
industry" for "small valley."

What does Zuck's level of personal awesome have to do with anything? This
strikes me as a major confusion about the business/consumer relationship. I
know Zuck, and I happen to think he's a fine guy, but you don't, and you
shouldn't have to.

I don't trust Google because Eric Schmidt is spiritually advanced, or because
an engineer who now works at Facebook coined a tongue-in-cheek "Don't be evil"
motto 12 years and 25,000 employees ago; I trust it because its search
business' incentives are aligned with mine as a searcher.

So, what are Facebook's incentives? Facebook wants you to use its service to
communicate with friends, so that it can show you targeted display ads. In the
long run, using the service requires you to feel comfortable with who has
access to your data, so Facebook's business has to get privacy and openness
approximately right. Like everything about a customer-facing service, that
turns out to be harder than it looks, at least while providing a stream of new
features, but get it right we must for the business' health. But you're about
to find out _all_ about that...

~~~
btilly
_What does Zuck's level of personal awesome have to do with anything? This
strikes me as a major confusion about the business/consumer relationship._

The answer is, "a lot". And there is no confusion.

I believe that Facebook's behavior stems from attitudes I dislike at the top.
Believing this, I believe that they will continue to push the boundary. You're
right that they need to find the right balance between openness and privacy.
However the corporate DNA looks to me like they consistently err on the side
of openness for profit.

Worse yet, the corporate belief seems to be that while people will moan, they
will accept continued encroachment on privacy. As someone who has things that
I really need to keep private, I don't trust that and don't want my
information there.

As for Google's social ventures, I have nothing to do with that and know
little about it. If Google starts doing the sorts of things that I see
Facebook doing, then I'll readjust my thinking about Google. Companies do
change. In the meantime I have my preferences.

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kmavm
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 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.

Facebook Platform and the Graph API enable everyone to bring their own
information to millions of sites and applications, including even Google’s
YouTube."

~~~
yanw
A friend won't care that you have their email address it's sorta expected, and
one could also argue about whether an email address is even private
information.

Or maybe Facebook could allow the export of some other friend identifier.

~~~
Zaak
If email addresses were rarely abused, then a private email address would be
like an unlisted phone number.

Email address abuse is extremely common however, so public should not be the
default.

~~~
yanw
But in this case emails are not being used to compile a list for spammers but
to help someone find/invite their finding onto a new platform.

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plemer
I cannot think of a less appropriate organization to declare this exact
criticism.

~~~
megaman821
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.

~~~
lukeschlather
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.

~~~
axavier
Google did break the Orkut data exporter, then completely removed it when
people were trying to switch out of Orkut. I'm not sure how that's accusing
them of committing a crime they didn't commit - it's a fact.

------
petercooper
_The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and
controls her information._

Sounds very noble but I suspect this is far from Facebook's "most important
principle."

------
pmb
Openness also doesn't mean being a sucker. Share and share-alike provides an
optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma of openness.

~~~
araneae
They're stuck in a continuous defect!

~~~
pmb
Not at all - Google is defecting, but is offering to cease defecting under
certain conditions. It's only continuous if Facebook keeps being a jerk.

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dools
Can a comment on the tech crunch blog by one of the Facebook engineers be
taken as an official Facebook position?

~~~
fleitz
Who cares. Seriously, this stuff is very much inside baseball which is why
Facebook doesn't even care to comment. Changing the icon on the Like button
will generate far more negative PR than this ever will, and spawn 10,000 "OMG,
I hate the new like button" groups.

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endergen
They made up their contorted Social Expectation. Most of us have never really
thought of what we expect our friends to be able to do with our information. I
think we all assume that we trust our friends to occasionally share too much
but you have to trust them to some point to just use their best judgement,
even now they can go share your email anyway.

One way network grabs are cheap tactics. A user should be able to leave a
network with the data that's been entrusted in them, just like with Address
books, Calendars, or other trustingly shared data.

This is all about crippling the convenience of people leaving their network
for competitors. You can already share with out permission, just not easily.
This isn't about protecting our privacy, it's just about slowing down our
power to go elsewhere at will.

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mikeryan
Its been just about a year since I joined Facebook and started using it a lot.
I have to say I'm kind of over it. I'm not closing my account or anything. I
just think my usage is going to drop a bit precipitously.

I don't really trust Facebook anymore. I don't think they're evil, I just
think at some point they're going to have to make some tough choices to live
up to their valuation and the only real value they have (outside of ad
eyeballs) is their user and graph information. Its going to end up in 3rd
parties hands and I'm not very comfortable with that.

Anyway, not sure thats on point but it was something I've kind of been
thinking about the last few days and this just drove a few points home.

------
indigoviolet
It's interesting how noone wants to actually respond to the arguments that
Mike Vernal is making, instead resorting to the equivalent of "Facebook is
evil, how dare they say they aren't!".

~~~
guelo
If I happend to email you once 2 years ago did I consent to be linked to you
when you join Facebook?

------
m3mb3r
Man, I can't believe we have these huge discussions about some petty fights.
We know both parties are talking crap to uphold their selfish positions, don't
we?

------
naner
_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 your address book is the exact same thing as exporting a
list of your friends' email addresses.

He had good points against Google, though.

~~~
WesleyJohnson
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 privacy concern than what we're
discussing, but exporting data of friends just seems _different_ to _me_ than
exporting contacts from Google. Janet may have exposed her email address and
phone number to me on facebook by "friending" me, but she's really just an
acquaintance I met through a friend and emailing or calling her is more
intimate than either of us want. Conversely, Judy and I met through a work
colleague and she wants to do lunch and talk about a startup so she asked for
my email address. I now feel like I have _permission_ to email her as well.

My argument doesn't sound convincing, even to myself, but I still feel like
the two forms of interaction and communication come with different inherent
understandings. I have ~130 friends on facebook all of whom I've met in person
save a single contact. The one I haven't met I would and have emailed, but out
of the others I'd say 20% are people that would be welcome to receiving an
email from me and vice versa. Emailing the other 80% would feel like an
encroachment on my part. That said, why would I never need to mass download or
import facebook contact details? I've already added the people I am inclined
to email into my Google contacts, because there has been a mutual and
deliberate decision to exchange contact information.

Not sure where I'm going with this, thinking out loud perhaps. ;)

Edit: Typos...

~~~
naner
_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.

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lkozma
I wonder if it is common strategy to have an export feature but willingly
leave it broken. Some users will think they made a mistake and stay with the
service out of inertia (?). I have seen broken exports in suspiciously many
online services, most recently in everyone's favorite commenting engine. After
filing a bug report, they quickly sent me my data and told me they are working
on the issue. I want to believe !

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anigbrowl
If it's on the internet it's public domain, apparently.

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its_raining
Well, now I keep bouncing between Facebook and Google regarding who's "right".

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temp0
The pimps are fighting over the data again. I wonder which one will win?

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gaiusparx
To make peace, maybe Google should buy Facebook. Or is it the other way round?

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araneae
I've just noticed that Facebook suddenly looks shitty in Chrome (padding on
the left up and went). Coincidence?

