> This will slow down my AOL-using friends who gave away all their contact info to Facebook and now I get pelted with spam ...
Right; there are practical usability problems with allowing willy-nilly access to your contact list. Some of your contacts have now given your email address to a company with which you never wanted to have a relationship.
Which is precisely Facebook's reasoning for not providing an API to download your friends' email addresses. Thanks for providing a concrete reminder of the legitimacy of this choice.
Right; there are practical usability problems with allowing willy-nilly access to your contact list. Some of your contacts have now given your email address to a company with which you never wanted to have a relationship.
This is a red herring. Facebook lets me choose whether my friends can give away literally anything else that's part of my Facebook presence to third party apps. In fact, there's a strong recommendation that I allow as much access to apps as possible, in the name of a "more social" experience. They let apps that I've never used spam me daily, I don't really get the sense that they care whether they force me into relationships with companies I have no interest in, as long as it happens within Facebook.
Why should I not get to decide whether to expose my e-mail address? If I want to, I'm allowed to set my e-mail address to "Everyone" visibility in my profile, literally the only thing I'm not allowed to do is expose it via the API.
That's a very deliberate choice, and maybe I'm a cynic, but it strikes me as mighty telling that the lack of API access to the e-mail part of the social graph is just about the only barrier in the way of Google being able to reconstitute the entire Gmail intersection of Facebook's social graph (Facebook UIDs don't suffice, because Google can't match these to e-mail addresses without the users explicitly doing so for them).
This makes the assumption you already have a relationship (an account) with Facebook. If you do not have an account with Facebook, you do not have this control. kmavm's post indicates that they do not have, nor do they want to have, such an account.
However, this wish has no effect on Facebook, they will continue to send him invites on the behalf of his friends, who uploaded his email address for him.
What is Facebook's reasoning, then, for providing an API to download complete friend lists, location, real names, and other data a user didn't wade through privacy settings to lock down?
Handing information to a company with which a user never wanted to have a relationship is bad when it results in spam-filled inboxes, which end users might notice and directly associate with FB's policies. As long as the potential abuse is hidden from the user's view, though, FB wholeheartedly endorses it.
Right; there are practical usability problems with allowing willy-nilly access to your contact list. Some of your contacts have now given your email address to a company with which you never wanted to have a relationship.
Which is precisely Facebook's reasoning for not providing an API to download your friends' email addresses. Thanks for providing a concrete reminder of the legitimacy of this choice.