The industry thrust for data portability brotherhood hit a bump on Thursday when Facebook suspended Google’s Friend Connect service from accessing Facebook members’ information.
A post Thursday on Facebook’s developer blog, explains that the social network has suspended participation in Google’s “Friend Connect” project because “it 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,” explained Facebook’s Charlie Cheever in the company’s developers blog.
“Now that Google has started Friend Connect, we have had a chance to evaluate the technology,” the post by Cheever read. “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,” Cheever wrote.
Facebook has already contacted Google “several times” about the issue and is looking forward to finding a resolution, according to Cheever.
Google on Monday announced plans to make its applications available to outside Web sites. The offering, dubbed Google “Friend Connect,” will let webmasters add Google social features like chat to their Web sites with just a few clicks.
“Web sites will be able to easily incorporate Friend Connect to allow users to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, LinkedIn and others,” Mussie Shore, product manager for Friend Connect, wrote in a Monday blog post.
Also last week, Facebook announced a similar service called “Facebook Connect,” which lets users put their profile data on various Web sites across the Internet. A day earlier, MySpace unveiled a service that does the same thing, dubbed Data Availability.
“We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy,” Cheever wrote.
Exactly how Friend Connect falls short of Facebook’s standards was not explained. For its part, Google does not fully understand what it needs to do in order to comply with Facebook’s terms of service, said Google Engineering Director David Glazer in a phone interview.
“We think users should be in control of their data. When we built Friend Connect, we designed it very carefully to put users in control of their information at every step of the way. We are disappointed that Facebook chose to disable their users’ ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends,” Glazer said.
“Some industry observers are indicating that the move is intending to thwart Google’s progress in the social networking space.”
According to Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly, the social network never actually had a formal partnership with Google in Friend Connect, which allows owners of Web sites to add social features using the existing APIs from sites like Hi5, Plaxo, and Facebook. “There was not participation to start with. That was sort of a mis-impression that may have been formed by their release,” he said. “We were not briefed on how the Friend Connect product was going to work.”
Google shares Facebook’s beliefs that users need to be in control of their data and that their privacy needs to be respected. “I agree strongly with the values they assert, and I believe the APIs they have released do a good job of honoring those values. I do not understand at this point why they have chosen to do something that does not align with those values,” Glazer said.
Google held talks with Facebook before and after the announcement of Friend Connect on Monday around the issue in question, and conversations are ongoing, Glazer said.
Facebook got into a privacy snafu of its own when it launched an advertising program, called “Beacon,” that sent users’ third-party activity on partnering retail and social-media sites to their Facebook profiles. The Facebook user base as a whole did not seem to care much, but a few vocal privacy advocates said that there were not adequate controls in place. Facebook eventually modified the application after a series of PR skirmishes that the company likely does not wish to repeat.
Facebook’s stand has some backing from outside the company. On the announcement of Friend Connect, Gartner research director Ray Valdes said “we believe that these initiatives will succeed only to the extent that they maintain user privacy and control over information disclosure.”
It is not a secret that data portability itself is a complicated matter to solve due to significant technical as well as commercial and operational challenges that surround it.
However, none of the three initiatives even comes close to providing a broad data portability solution, although MySpace, Google and Facebook have been commended by industry observers for at least taking some first steps to address the issue.