Google/Facebook Saga Continues: Google Warns Not To “Trap” Your Data

Continuing on from Danny’s Facebook: You’ve No Right To Export Email Addresses , it appears Google has upped the ante. ReadWriteWeb noticed that when you try to export your contacts to Facebook, Google gives you a big warning.

This warning stems from Google recently changing their terms of service of their contacts API to prevent Facebook from using it without allowing Facebook users to export their data. Yesterday, Facebook began allowing you to export the names of your friends, but nothing all that useful. Google’s response is a new warning page having you think twice before exporting your Gmail contacts to Facebook.

The warning can be viewed over here and it reads:

Trap my contacts now

Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out?

Here’s the not-so-fine print. You have been directed to this page from a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends. So once you import your data there, you won’t be able to get it out. We think this is an important thing for you to know before you import your data there. Although we strongly disagree with this data protectionism, the choice is yours. Because, after all, you should have control over your data.

Of course, you are always free to download your contacts using the export feature in Google Contacts.

This public service announcement is brought to you on behalf of your friends in Google Contacts.

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About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.