Who owns your data? The latest battle between Facebook, Google, and an application designed to make your contacts more portable raises that question. Facebook is blocking this application, apparently afraid that its members are using it to move their contacts over to Google's new social service, Google Plus.
The application itself is a Google Chrome extension called Facebook Friend Exporter. Created by Mohamed Mansour, it was released back in November 2010, well before Google+ came out. The application lets users export contact information from Facebook – name, e-mail address, phone number, birthday, and more – and save it as a spreadsheet file. Users can also import the information directly into their Gmail address book, if they so choose.
The exporter only works on the English version of Facebook. It's become very popular; its home page states that it had more than 22,000 users as of July 5. Unfortunately, the current version, 2.2.2, may be blocked by Facebook.
Mansour offers an update of the situation on the home page: “Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile...it will no longer work for many people.” He noted that he's currently deploying a new version with a different design, and explained that “You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me.”
So why exactly is Facebook doing this? Let's put aside the obvious explanation for a moment, and note that the extension does in fact violate Facebook's terms of service. Section 3.2 from the social network's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities states specifically that “You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”
And exactly why would Facebook make such a restriction? Believe it or not, it's a privacy issue. Yes, the social site boasts (if that's the right word) a poor record on this score, but it's a legitimate concern. Also, as Joe Wilcox points out, “Facebook rightly doesn't want marketers or cybercriminals taking massive amounts of personal data.”
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