Re:Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting fri...
by rufibarbatus on Tuesday July 05, 2011 @10:00AM
(#2729825)
IANAL, but I thought this might bring some light:
> The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.
> Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.
So the way they're construing this, contact information is not your data to begin with, but rather someone else's data which you've been granted (perfectly revokable) access to. I don't know if this holds in court, but I'm pretty sure no one will bother bringing this to court to find out.
> The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.
> Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/googles-response-to-faceboo...
So the way they're construing this, contact information is not your data to begin with, but rather someone else's data which you've been granted (perfectly revokable) access to. I don't know if this holds in court, but I'm pretty sure no one will bother bringing this to court to find out.