<story><title>Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-blocks-google-chrome-extension-for-exporting-friends/1935</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>brendano</author><text>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&apos;t clear, and don&apos;t fit into our usual mental model of &quot;I own my own data!&quot;&lt;p&gt;This example is even clearer.  The app lets you export your friends&apos; names and contact information.  This isn&apos;t your information, it&apos;s your friends&apos;.  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&apos;ve downloaded it already you&apos;re depriving them of the right to control their own data.&lt;p&gt;Clearly social networks should be required to offer &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; sort of friend list information for export.  Maybe a bare list of user ID&apos;s is all that should be required -- the information about who your friends are seems legitimately like it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;yours&lt;/i&gt;.  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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sorbus</author><text>&amp;#62;  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&apos;ve downloaded it already you&apos;re depriving them of the right to control their own data.&lt;p&gt;Consider how ridiculous that would sound if you asked &quot;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?&quot;&lt;p&gt;That&apos;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&apos;s no reason to publish an email if you don&apos;t want to be emailed, and no reason to publish a phone number if you don&apos;t want to be called.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-blocks-google-chrome-extension-for-exporting-friends/1935</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>brendano</author><text>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&apos;t clear, and don&apos;t fit into our usual mental model of &quot;I own my own data!&quot;&lt;p&gt;This example is even clearer.  The app lets you export your friends&apos; names and contact information.  This isn&apos;t your information, it&apos;s your friends&apos;.  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&apos;ve downloaded it already you&apos;re depriving them of the right to control their own data.&lt;p&gt;Clearly social networks should be required to offer &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; sort of friend list information for export.  Maybe a bare list of user ID&apos;s is all that should be required -- the information about who your friends are seems legitimately like it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;yours&lt;/i&gt;.  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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sandipc</author><text>If I may go back a few years...&lt;p&gt;If my number is listed in the 1995 local big yellow phonebook but then I choose to have it unlisted in the 1996 phonebook, is it wrong for someone with the older phonebook to have my phone number?</text></comment>