

Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends - pushingbits
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-blocks-google-chrome-extension-for-exporting-friends/1935

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Shenglong
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.

~~~
Locke1689
FYI, if you go into Google+ and go to your account settings, you'll see a link
called "Data Liberation." This link will allow you to download all of your
data -- contacts, posts, pictures; everything -- and take it wherever you
like. The Data Liberation Front is Google's project to make sure that you can
withdraw your data from all Google sites as you please.

Disclaimer: I'm a Google intern this summer.

~~~
mapgrep
Does the export include email addresses? Facebook offers an "export" too, but
you just end up with HTML pages with your friends' names and no contact info.

~~~
Lewisham
So I just looked into what's in the VCards.

How it works is you get all your contacts, and the data _you're authorized to
see_. So, people who you're just following and aren't sharing anything with
you, just appear as Google Plus links. People who have you in their circles
and are sharing their email address with you will also have their email
address attached.

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mike-cardwell
Apparently there is a sanctioned method for pulling all of your Facebook
friends into Yahoo contacts:

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/invite-your-entire-
faceboo...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/invite-your-entire-facebook-
graph-into-google-plus/2124)

From there you can do what you want with them.

~~~
spot
then someone should make an extension (or webapp) that walks you through
creating the throwaway yahoo account and moving everything into G+.

~~~
windsurfer
I believe automating any part of the sign up process with Yahoo! is against
the TOS.

~~~
rufibarbatus
Thankfully, Yahoo! now lets you create an account via Facebook Connect, which
makes the whole exporting contacts ordeal super easy.

------
brendano
There is a legitimate question here -- do you own the information about your
friends, or do your friends? Many things on Facebook are a shared quasi-
public, quasi-private space where the ownership isn't clear, and don't fit
into our usual mental model of "I own my own data!"

This example is even clearer. The app lets you export your friends' names and
contact information. This isn't your information, it's your friends'. 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.

Clearly social networks should be required to offer _some_ sort of friend list
information for export. Maybe a bare list of user ID's is all that should be
required -- the information about who your friends are seems legitimately like
it's _yours_. Joining it against names and contact information is the
potentially privacy-invasive step; that could be done online, under control of
your friends, not you.

~~~
sorbus
> 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 wanted to remove your knowledge of their email
address)? What if they gave you information in person and now want to hide it
from you specifically?"

That's the mental model I, personally, use for social networks: any
information you choose to publish on it is fair game for whatever your friends
want to do with it (and they can do whatever they want with any information I
publish on it). Anyone who does not want to be contacted (or have their
contact information exported into other formats - such as the linking of name
and email address which is required to email) should not make it available -
there's no reason to publish an email if you don't want to be emailed, and no
reason to publish a phone number if you don't want to be called.

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

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

~~~
Silhouette
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?

~~~
esrauch
You are choosing to share the information with them. They can view your
profile and see it and type it wherever else they want, the only thing that
preventing automatic export achieves is making it inconvenient for someone to
leave facebook, not prevent someone from taking any conceivable action they
wanted with your information.

------
sleepyhead
From the article it seems like the app is scraping. Why? The Facebook Graph
API should be able return all this data. That Facebook prevent scraping, which
is most likely conducted by some scamming services, is a good thing IMHO
considering most (all?) of the data is available through their API. If this is
the case the title should be "Facebook prevents scraping" as Facebook still
allows export of data through the API. The Facebook Graph API usage is managed
by the specified permissions for the app and thus you can control it to a
greater extend compared to a browser extension which could do whatever it
wants to the pages you visit and your authenticated session.

~~~
someone13
From what I understand, the "official" API doesn't include friends' emails.

~~~
sleepyhead
You are right. It only returns name and id. You can only get the email address
of the authorized user. I still understand why Facebook would prevent scraping
though. And also I see many exploits of allowing access to your friends email
addresses.

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tomelders
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.

~~~
msy
I doubt there's a legal issue here, just grubby, low-brow behaviour, which is
basically par for the course for Facebook.

~~~
qq66
...you mean par for the course for large, powerful companies with a lot to
lose.

~~~
k_shehadeh
Yeah. Except Google's DLF allows you to export just about anything and
everything you can create in Google products. It's true that Google's search
is it's bread and butter but in the battle for good will, Facebook keeps
shooting itself in the foot.

------
phereford
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?

~~~
jkincaid
Google allowed Facebook to import your Google Contacts via an API for years.
Last fall it blocked Facebook's access to that API, saying that they'll
restore it when Facebook offers reciprocity (i.e. if Facebook begins to allow
users to export their FB contacts using a similar API, then Google will
reactivate Facebook's access to the Google Contacts API).

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.

~~~
sek
This does expose the bigotry of Facebook so much.

On the other hand the valuation is merely based on the fact that they are the
"one and only social network". They are dependent on this monopolistic
behavior or they are screwed and can forget an IPO.

Zuckerberg himself with this "i just try to connect people for the rest of my
life" seems to be under this bias. He is no Steve Jobs who was able under
almost any condition to create value.

This social network stuff has the biggest lock-in of all internet services,
but he can't prevent people from moving by force.

------
ben1040
Is this particularly new news? This extension was the first thing I tried
Wednesday night when I got into the service, and it didn't export anything but
profile URLs. I had to make a throwaway Yahoo account to export my contacts.

------
tahu
There's always various scrapers, like this
[http://vytautas.jakutis.name/2011/05/27/convert-your-
faceboo...](http://vytautas.jakutis.name/2011/05/27/convert-your-facebook-
friend-contacts-to-csv/) by me.

------
danoprey
I managed to use it to export my contacts about an hour ago. Successfully
imported them in to Gmail and G+. Strange.

I highly doubt that it is illegal, but it certainly breaks FB's TOS.

~~~
tomjen3
How did you import the contacts into G+?

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unicornporn
Lucky me I used it to export all my contacts (with tel numbers and mail
addresses) two weeks ago. It was a good extension.

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yuhong
If you search TechCrunch for "facebook google contacts", you will see some of
their old stories on this.

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stitchy
I think I used this extension months ago before it got blocked. Worked pretty
well, but I found that it didn't get all the information that I was hoping
for. Namely the e-mail address was missing for all of my contacts. Got their
bio info. and other stuff though.

------
blackRust
Also means @givememydata doesn't work. Was just planning on extracting list of
email addresses...
<https://twitter.com/#!/givememydata/status/88181497894404096>

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UtestMe
Actually they did not restrict the access to your own data, but to a specific
method of accessing them. Which, I am quite sure, is no legal issue for
anybody

~~~
bad_user
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 contacts or my own phone's contacts list or
Google+ or whatever. I have to go over each of those 122 acquaintances and
copy/paste their data manually.

What they are doing is definitely not illegal, but on the other hand I dislike
Facebook so much that I'm willing to switch to a competitor that already
engages in anti-competitive behavior by means of their near-monopoly, but that
knows how to treat my own data.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
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're the one getting spammed and your information
sold to other spam lists.

The key here is that Facebook relationships are not people you trust. They are
people you kind sorta know. That doesn't imply that they are trustworthy
enough to hand over your personal information to do whatever they wish with.

~~~
chc
Don't fool yourself. If they're not that trustworthy, you shouldn't be
friending them, because preventing known Chrome extensions from doing this
does not prevent the other 5000 ways (including a pen and paper) of doing the
same thing.

~~~
Silhouette
I would be offended if my friends started giving out my personal details to
random businesses using a pen and paper, too.

I don't personally use Facebook, having abandoned it almost immediately
precisely because my friends were collectively volunteering all kinds of
information that I considered private. Today, my friends know this is my view
and it's not a problem, nor am I the only one of my group who takes this view.
Obviously it took a while before my views became known, though.

In any case, this whole black-and-white idea that if you volunteer any
personal information to friends on one service with privacy controls you might
trust then that information is fair game for anyone to give to anyone else is
just silly. If it weren't, Facebook themselves wouldn't have been pressured
repeatedly into creating and maintaining all those privacy controls even
though it's not really in their interests to do so and they've tried to reduce
them again and failed on several occasions.

~~~
chc
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
info, it should be people you would trust to use that info properly. Facebook
stopping Google from importing your info but allowing Yahoo to do so won't
protect you at all.

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

~~~
chc
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 against their wishes, and lacking that tool
will not stop your friends from "giving" your info to Google.

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

~~~
Silhouette
> 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.

------
chrischen
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.

~~~
xtacy
This point was raised before; the Facebook export tool does not export your
social graph!

~~~
chrischen
You can use the API to export your friends list as facebook UIDs which can be
used to reconstruct your graph assuming your friends have also opted into the
third-party service with their facebook data/uid.

------
revorad
G+ should allow you to import your Facebook data if you download it using
Facebook's own export tool.

~~~
keeperofdakeys
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.

~~~
revorad
That just gives the Googmonster access to your other social accounts data, so
that it can "enhance" your search experience.

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ChrisAnn
Petty.

------
Slimy
Interesting that it took the launch of Google+ for Facebook to notice this
extension.

~~~
r00fus
Begun, the social wars have!

