Ryan Singel
Business

Google Adds Some Snark to Facebook Open-Data Battle

Google is adding some snark and trying to enlist its users in its ongoing spat with Facebook over identity on the web. The search giant is now warning Gmail users seeking to import their contacts into Facebook that the social network is “locking up your contact data about your friends.” The “Trap My Contacts” warning […]

Google is adding some snark and trying to enlist its users in its ongoing spat with Facebook over identity on the web. The search giant is now warning Gmail users seeking to import their contacts into Facebook that the social network is "locking up your contact data about your friends."

The "Trap My Contacts" warning page appears whenever a Facebook user tries to "add friends" by connecting to Google's Contact API. Google blocked Facebook from using that service, saying that Facebook doesn't reciprocate fairly. But Facebook does let users export their friends' e-mail addresses to Yahoo and Microsoft services. Facebook responded by deep-linking to Google's CSV file export feature, asking users to then upload that standardized file to Facebook.

While Google could block that link, instead they put up a "warning page," that lets users check a box to "register a complaint over data protectionism" and/or proceed with data export. The full text is below:

Trap My Data

Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out?

Here’s the not-so-fine print. You have been directed to this page from a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends. So once you import your data there, you won’t be able to get it out. We think this is an important thing for you to know before you import your data there. Although we strongly disagree with this data protectionism, the choice is yours. Because, after all, you should have control over your data.

Of course, you are always free to download your contacts using the export feature in Google Contacts.

This public service announcement is brought to you on behalf of your friends in Google Contacts.

Register a complaint over data protectionism. (Google will not record or display your name or email address.)
Proceed with exporting this data. I recognize that once it’s been imported to another service, that service may not allow me to export it back out.

Select one or more options.

Why this fight now?

Well, e-mail addresses aren't just a way to write to a person you know. They serve as a unique identifier, not unlike a Social Security number or driver's license number. Social sites use e-mail addresses to connect you to other users. Facebook is pretending that it's looking out for its users, when in fact, it is acting like the dominant market player that it is. It's using its advantage as the biggest social network to force others to play by the rules it sets.

Given that Google is readying a new social application to rectify its earlier failures to build a sticky social service, the company desperately wants people to be able to port over their contacts and their unique identifiers over to that new service.

Google knows, just as Facebook does, that individuals have spent hours building up their web of connections on Facebook. Google says it's the right thing -- for users and other services -- for that so-called "social graph" to belong to users. For its part, Facebook is willing to let other services rely on its so-called "Open Graph" services, but Facebook, not its users, retains ownership and control.

Openness has always been a key tool for challengers, and Google is using that tool well here. But Facebook is the Ma Bell of social networking, and it's made it clear that it's willing to live with the charge of being a data hypocrite -- at least until after Google debuts its social network. Then if that seems to fail -- in no small part from being starved of data from Facebook -- Facebook can announce with a flourish a more-open contact-export policy.

If Facebook has taught us anything, it's that our identities are inextricable from our connections to other people. Building relentlessly on that idea put Facebook at the center of the net, allowing it to become the company people rely on: to communicate with friends, craft an online persona and log them in around the net. That's a much bigger deal than most people think.

Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: If Facebook won't let you export your connections to whomever you like, it is claiming ownership over your identity.

Even if it has a nice way for you to export your photos.

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