SimpleGeo. Facebook Finds A New Way To Liberate Your Gmail Contact Data. That huge sucking sound you hear is Facebook, piling data from third parties into its mouth as fast as it can while it remains stubbornly greedy about releasing its own data to anyone it doesn’t like. Which is mostly Google these days, since Yahoo and AOL completely surrendered and Microsoft actually owns part of them. Google shut them down last week, restricting API access and effectively blocking contacts exports to Facebook in any automated way.
This is, I wrote, the true beginning of data protectionism. Now Facebook has found a way around that restriction. They’re leveraging a Google feature that lets users download their own data for their own use – part of Google’s golf-clap worthy data liberation effort. They’ve hacked a solution around the block by giving users a direct deep link to the download feature. And then users can upload that file directly to Facebook. Can Google block this? It’s also a big middle finger to Google.
Update: Google’s response here. Google To Facebook: You Can’t Import Our User Data Without Reciprocity. The war between Google and Facebook is heating up: Google just made one small tweak to its Terms of Service that will have a big impact on the world’s biggest social network. From now on, any service that accesses Google’s Contacts API — which makes it easy to import your list of friends’ and coworkers’ email addresses into another service — will need to offer reciprocity. Facebook doesn’t, so it’s going to lose access to this key piece of the social graph.
So what does that mean in layman’s terms? When you initially sign up for Facebook, you’re run through a series of prompts asking you to enter your Google account information so that Facebook can import the email addresses of your contacts. This is a very powerful feature because it helps new users instantly connect with dozens of their friends.
You see, Facebook has never allowed users to export the contact information of their friends. Yes and no. Here’s the relevant addition of the Terms of Service for the Contacts API: 5.8. Facebook Now Allows You To “Download Your Information” Whoah. Until now there hasn’t been a way to download info off of Facebook, but at today’s Facebook event in Palo Alto, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a feature that allows users to port their data from Facebook in a .zip file, “People own and have control over all info they put into Facebook and “Download Your Information” enables people to take stuff with them,” says Zuckerberg. “Download Your Information” is groundbreaking as the premise behind the Diaspora Project is that it is the “open” portable Facebook.
As of today it seems like Facebook is the “open” portable Facebook, as the company now feels secure enough to let users leave with info intact. Downloading your profile in this way does not delete it from the site, but simply provides you with a copy. Users wishing to erase their data entirely will have to go through the process of deleting their entire Facebook profile, separately from “Download Your Information.” Facebook Gives All Developers Access To Full Set Of Places APIs (Including Their Venue Database) Saving Jobseekers from Themselves: New Law to Stop Companies from Checking Facebook Pages in Germany.
Lying about qualifications. Alcohol and drug use. Racist comments. These are just some of the reasons why potential bosses reject job applicants after looking at their Facebook profiles. According to a 2009 survey commissioned by the website CareerBuilder, some 45 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates. And some 35 percent of those employers had rejected candidates based on what they found there, such as inappropriate photos, insulting comments about previous employers or boasts about their drug use. But those Facebook users hoping to apply for a job in Germany should pause for a moment before they hit the "deactivate account" button. According to reports in the Monday editions of the Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspapers, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has drafted a new law on data privacy for employees which will radically restrict the information bosses can legally collect.
Toilets to Be Off-Limits Keep track of the news. Facebook Tightens Security On Developer Apps. Users must now grant permission for their data to be accessed by third-party applications, websites, and services. Acting on its pledge to simplify privacy and give account holders more control over their data, Facebook Wednesday launched a new system that forces developers to request and receive permission when users connect to third-party applications, websites, and services.
"With this new authorization process, when you log into an application with your Facebook account, the application will only be able to access the public parts of your profile by default. To access the private sections of your profile, the application has to explicitly ask for your permission," said Bret Taylor, CTO at Facebook, in a company ' blog.
"These improvements reflect two core Facebook beliefs: first, your data belongs to you; second, it should be easy to control what you share. There are more than 550,000 active applications on Facebook, according to the company. More Insights.