Facebook's argument that this data actually belongs to the friends and not the profile that's being exported, while convenient for Facebook, has to be acknowledged as a reasonable point of view on this matter.

Their argument doesn't hold up under the slightest amount of scrutiny. You can go to your friends' pages and manually extract their email or other contact information. If it's visible to you, its because your friend made a decision to make that information visible. They designed the data export tool that way knowing that the main thing someone trying to leave Facebook wants is contact information for their friends that they may only know how to reach on Facebook.

so if a person puts a number on a page, that also means they want everyone scraping it? that's not a very privacy-friendly perspective.

If I put my number or email on my page, and I adjust the privacy settings to "only friends", I understand I am making that information available to my friends. They are free to copy that information by hand, or by copy-pasting, into their own address book. I have explicitly made it available to them. Facebook includes information about your friends, such as their birthdays, in your data export. Their decision to not include off-Facebook contact information is a business decision designed to make leaving Facebook harder. It has nothing to do with privacy.

Facebook lets you export "your data" which they define as data that you input into Facebook. They don't define it as data that you can see. Likewise companies usually don't let you export what their machine learning AIs have inferred about you. So they're using loopholes to make data portability less useful.

That's not your data - it's theirs (the respective persons)

No it's not. If someone gives you their physical business card, would you expect to lose access to it if you move houses? Once they give you their contact info, you should have a copy of it forever. Otherwise it's completely useless.

Isn't that an argument Facebook could make too, that it's not your data now that you've given it to them?

No. Because that's the same argument FB could make.

No. Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it. Now in practice, you can't. I get that. But that doesn't mean that it's not your data.

Certainly your contact info is your data. I shouldn't be able to give a girl's contact info to some other guy without her consent. One, that's douchey. Two, it's not my data, so doing so violates her privacy.

> Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it.

So you would argue that it's fine that Apple was deleting people's email the other day, because it's not really their data?

I don't know what you're talking about.

But for an answer's sake, no, Apple should not be able to delete an email I wrote. But that's the entire point of what I just said. I should be the final arbiter of my data. Me putting my data on an Apple Mac does not make the data Apple's. It's still my data. I should be able to show it to other people, or delete it whenever I like.

Apple should not be able to show it to other people.

Apple should not be able to delete it whenever they like.

But again, that's what I said in the first place.

>Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it.

So I really don't get your question at all?