[kmavm]

It is perfectly easy for other web services to access the data of a logged-in Facebook user, provided that the user has granted permission via Facebook Connect. This is how Facebook's "Download your Data" product[1] works; it is entirely implemented through publicly available graph APIs.

What Google is insisting on is "download my friends' data." This is where Facebook currently draws the line; we make it easy to retrieve your own data programmatically, while retrieving your friends' data programmatically is harder.

And, whatever Google says, Facebook is right to draw the line somewhere, and probably at friends' contact info. Consider an immediate consequence of doing what Google is insisting on: Zynga (e.g.) will spam all of their users' friends' emails. Because now they can retrieve them in bulk via a Facebook API. If you use Facebook, and tomorrow you started getting reams of email from applications you do not use, would you think, "How wonderful that Facebook has finally liberated my data!"? Or would you, maybe, be annoyed, and wonder why Facebook would ever consider making such a boneheaded decision?

[1] https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php -> "Download your Information"

[msg]

Ridiculous. Facebook could whitelist only the user, not any proxy, to download whatever data friends already make available to users inside the boundaries of privacy controls. This is only sensible since it's already exposed to the user. If the user dedicated human time to archiving a bunch of web pages, they could reconstruct their contacts. But it's much simpler for the computer to do it.

The user could sell out their friends to a third party if they chose to (opt in). But Zynga would only get access if the user said so.

The reason Facebook won't do it is that it would commoditize the social graph and allow straight head to head competition on features. I think no one, even Facebook, knows how that would turn out...

Except for Google, who clearly decided to make it happen.