Google recently released Friend Connect, a system which allows a
user of social networking sites to export details from within those
services to other websites or services which are part of the Google
system.
Facebook, though, has claimed that the Google service violates
user privacy and its own terms and conditions and has suspended
access to the service, though Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has
said that he would like to talk to Google to resolve the
problem.
"We’ve found that [Friend Connect] redistributes user
information from Facebook to other developers without users’
knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users
have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service,"
Facebook's Charlie Cheever said in his blog.
"Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that
redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand,
we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user
information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to
Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them
to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they
choose," he said.
Google disagrees with Facebook's assessment of its
technology.
"The only user information that we pass from a social networking
site to third-party applications is the user's public photo, and
even that is under user control," said a Google blog in response to
the Facebook suspension.
"We never handle passwords from other sites, we never store
social graph data from other sites, and we never pass users' social
network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications," it
said.
Facebook has been a massive success since 2006 when it stopped
restricting access to students and graduates of US universities. It
has been more successful in luring professional, slightly older
internet users than competitors MySpace or Bebo, giving it a very
lucrative audience to which to sell advertising.
It has not surprised observers that the company has stopped
Google from allowing people to take their contact lists out of the
Facebook system, though founder Zuckerberg has claimed that he is
prepared to negotiate with Google.
"We want to talk to Google about this and see if there's a way
we can make it work," Zuckerberg told a press conference in Tokyo
this week, according to InfoWorld.
Facebook's terms for application developers say that they cannot
store 'Facebook Properties' in a database from where they can be
sold, shared, leased or distributed to third parties.
Facebook has announced its own data-sharing service called
Facebook Connect. This is designed to allow Facebook members to use
their Facebook profiles on partner websites, linking information
and services on those websites to Facebook and data contained in
it.
The service will not go live for a number of weeks, though, and
it is not clear exactly how it will work.
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