Late last year, in an article about the need for interconnectedness of social networks and the ownership of user profile data, I wrote:
If Facebook can connect to another service with your account (and your permission), what’s stopping the creation of a MetaSocial Network. A network to which you provide the login details for all of the major social networks out there for which you already have accounts, it automatically logs in and accesses your profile information, including your friend list and incorporates everything in a single, beautiful environment.
Google went on and actually implemented this (and much more while at it) in its Friend Connect service. And then Facebook, prompty moved to ban the service from accessing its users’ profiles. The reason for doing so was that Google redistributes the data to third-party developers without the users’ consent. Google responded that it only redistributes data that the user has consented to sharing (with any particular site) and, in addition to this, the data is merely links to profiles and photos. Google goes as far as to replace Facebook usernames and numeric ids with its own and purges data every 30 minutes. This is much less than Facebook’s 24hour maximum for data retention by third-party developers, although — to my knowledge — the company has no way of enforcing this. It is thus somewhat ironic that Facebook is concerned with the privacy of its users, especially given its history of trying to exploit it in the most insidious manner (viz. Beacon) as well as its response to Google’s Friend Connect. Someone that wants to harvest data off Facebook merely has to create a trojan pointless application of the sort that adorns most profiles and then start harvesting. Facebook doesn’t seem to care about the privacy of its users. The reason it reacts to Google’s service and invokes privacy as a reason for doing so is because it sees Google as a threat. A threat that might one day showcase how closed, arrogant and — in retrospect — irrelevant it is as a platform. If anything the network has proven to be hypocritical and excessively arrogant, both when faced with criticism by its users and the industry as a whole.