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Facebook, Google in Stalemate over Social Data

Techtree News Staff, May 26, 2008 1236 hrs IST

But no sooner did they introduce the new features than Facebook suspended 'Friend Connect' citing privacy policies as reason.

With the current fad for social networks to be more open and give their users a greater degree of control, soon after MySpace announced 'data portability' allowing its users share their public profile data with other Web sites, Facebook and Google seemed to follow suit with their 'Facebook Connect' and 'Friend Connect' respectively. But no sooner did they introduce the new features than Facebook suspended 'Friend Connect' citing privacy policies as reason. A post on the Web site's developer page alleged that 'Friend Connect' re-distributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge. And that this goes against Facebook's privacy standards that have been hitherto strictly adhered to. To this, Google said it does pass data but maintained that sharing is limited to those users who've agreed to share data with a particular site. To assuage the concerns raised by Facebook, Google further said that user names and numeric ids on Facebook are replaced with its own identifiers. Also that Facebook data is purged from its systems every 30 minutes, which is more frequent than the 24 hours that are taken by Facebook itself. All said, Google's 'Friend Connect' still remains suspended for Facebook users. Interestingly in November last year, Google had unveiled its OpenSocial service that lets developers write applications for use on multiple social networks. News Corp's MySpace had joined OpenSocial while Facebook still hasn't.