Google vs. Facebook- A Blow By Blow Report

Posted by in Technology


Google and Facebook are in a seemingly no-holds barred fistfight over data protection. The spat started late Thursday, November 4th. Google, who is upset with the social media site over its one-way data misuse and ever changing privacy policy, announced that they will no longer allow Facebook access to Gmail user's contact lists. In the past, new Facebook users could opt to import their contact lists from Gmail to find and add their contacts to the new Facebook account. The problem is that there is no way for a Facebook user to export their contact list and add Facebook friends to their Gmail contacts. In fact, this service is only available to Yahoo and MSN users. Both companies are partners with Facebook. In a statement from Google,

“We have a data-liberation engineering team dedicated to building import and export tools for users. We are not alone. Many other sites allow users to import and export their information, including contacts, quickly and easily. But sites that do not, such as Facebook, leave users in a data dead end,” Google said in a statement. “[W]e will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users’ Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites.”

In response to this, Facebook decided to openly attack Google. Although they issued no public statement about Google's actions, they quickly showed Google what they thought about the ban by telling their users how to exploit a backdoor loophole and download their contact list into a file that can be uploaded to Facebook. According to a report at TechCruch:
“Can Google block this? One engineer I spoke with says yes, but it will be difficult: “If Google wanted to, they could block it immediately. it’s pretty simple. just put a CSRF token on the url to block deep linking but that might [mess] up other CSV flows. Maybe they have an outlook importer or something. facebook really went aggressive here.” It’s also a big middle finger to Google.”
Following Facebook's action, Google responded. First, by issuing this statement:
We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.


Secondly, when users try following the instructions they received from Facebook, they are met with this page:



Although users can still opt to download their contact list for importing to Facebook, they are given Google's side of the argument. It isn't clear why these two companies are in such a slapping match. I think that it has a whole lot to do with Google's new social networking site “GoogleMe” which is slated to be released soon. The larger issue here is that Google doesn't want to allow Facebook to continue its data hording policies, and is concerned that the social networking site is attempting to fashion itself into the guardian of its users internet identity.


The Google supported group dataliberation.org, works to help Google users protect their data. They say that for a large internet company to “not be evil” they need to allow users to get out any data they have put in, and to not trap end user data. In their minds, Facebook is violating both of those ideals.

Google uses personal data from their users in order to target Ad-sense ads. The catch is that they don't keep the data or associate it with your account. With Facebook's new privacy policy, any data is associated with your name and profile photo, and also, getting your information out is next to impossible.

It will be interesting to see how this fight turns out. I, for one, wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of Google.



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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.

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