Data Held Hostage: The War Between Google and Facebook

Just think about this for a second. Google and Facebook are fighting over your data. Google doesn’t want Facebook to import your contacts and Facebook doesn’t want to also import your data. Google says it should be reciprocal, Facebook should allow other services to import their data. Whose data again? Our data. That’s right. These multi-billionaire networks are fighting over our data. Our data is worth a mint to them. Has anybody asked us if we want to share our information? I don’t think so. So before these two fight over the custody of our data , we should have a say in this matter. It is our data and we should be able to expropriate it as we see fit to do so.

Google is committed to making it easy for users to get their data into and out of Google products. That is why 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.

So we have decided to change our approach slightly to reflect the fact that users often aren’t aware that once they have imported their contacts into sites like Facebook they are effectively trapped. Google users will still be free to export their contacts from our products to their computers in an open, machine-readable format–and once they have done that they can then import those contacts into any service they choose. However, we will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users’ Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites.

What others are saying.

Google block on Facebook heats up war.

War between Google and Facebook | You can not import our user data without reciprocity says Google to Facebook

The war between Google and Facebook continues. Google makes one small tweak that will have a huge impact on Facebook.

The War Between Google and Facebook Heats up

Tony M.

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