Data portability: walls go up

16 May 2008

Open data portability may remain further away than was thought, after Facebook barred Google's Friend Connect from accessing its information.

Friend Connect, one of a rash of recently-announced data portability initiatives, makes friend lists and other information from social networks available to third-party websites, allowing smaller sites to benefit from their features.

However, writing yesterday in the Facebook Developers blog, developer Charlie Cheever explained that Facebook had decided to block Friend Connect's access to Facebook data, on the grounds that using it elsewhere threatened the privacy of Facebook users' data.

"We've found that [Friend Connect] redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge," Cheever wrote, "which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service."

However, after speaking to representatives from both Google and Facebook, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington concluded that Google was taking "perfectly adequate" steps to protect user privacy.

"After talking with both sides, it seems to me that Facebook is relying on a very convenient catch-22 to stay out of Google's network," he wrote.

"They are the ones in control of their own API functionality, and they could add features that fix this problem."

Category: Google, Other, Social media