Google, Facebook In Standoff Over Social Data
New York – Google Inc.’s online groups of people have little grip in the United States, but the search leader carry on to seek a spot in the social-networking hierarchy. And if it bets on catching up with other popular social networks, then first it must deal with Facebook, the No. 2 online hangout behind MySpace.
Friend Connect Privacy Commotion
Facebook has put in abeyance the use of a Google service which allowed people to export their Facebook friends list to other websites, stating that the Google service violates users’ privacy.
Days after Google released Friend Connect, a system which allows a user of social networking sites of musicians, political campaigns and others to export profile data from several social networks, Facebook began to block the program.
Although Google was utilizing the same tools that Facebook freely made available to other outside developers, Facebook, though, asserts that the Google service violates user privacy and its own terms and conditions and has suspended access to the service, although Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that he would like to talk to Google to resolve the problem.
“The two sides remain in a standoff.”
“We have found that [Friend Connect] redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which does not 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 have been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we have had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We have 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.
Google replied, admitting it passes along data. But it said sharing is limited to links for profile photos of users and friends who have expressly consented to sharing with that particular site. The user’s name and numeric ID on Facebook are replaced with Google’s own identifiers, 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.
Google also said it removes Facebook data from its systems every 30 minutes, more frequently than the 24 hours required by Facebook.