[naner]

A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends.

Not really, exporting your address book is the exact same thing as exporting a list of your friends' email addresses.

He had good points against Google, though.

[WesleyJohnson]

I think the difference is that if you email someone, most everyone understands that you're giving the user your email address and permission to email you back unless you use a disposable email address. Contrast that "knowledge" with facebook email addresses. How many people are really aware of whether or not their email on facebook is public, friend of friend, friend, etc?

I suppose that's a separate usability and privacy concern than what we're discussing, but exporting data of friends just seems different to me than exporting contacts from Google. Janet may have exposed her email address and phone number to me on facebook by "friending" me, but she's really just an acquaintance I met through a friend and emailing or calling her is more intimate than either of us want. Conversely, Judy and I met through a work colleague and she wants to do lunch and talk about a startup so she asked for my email address. I now feel like I have permission to email her as well.

My argument doesn't sound convincing, even to myself, but I still feel like the two forms of interaction and communication come with different inherent understandings. I have ~130 friends on facebook all of whom I've met in person save a single contact. The one I haven't met I would and have emailed, but out of the others I'd say 20% are people that would be welcome to receiving an email from me and vice versa. Emailing the other 80% would feel like an encroachment on my part. That said, why would I never need to mass download or import facebook contact details? I've already added the people I am inclined to email into my Google contacts, because there has been a mutual and deliberate decision to exchange contact information.

Not sure where I'm going with this, thinking out loud perhaps. ;)

Edit: Typos...

[naner]

Contrast that "knowledge" with facebook email addresses. How many people are really aware of whether or not their email on facebook is public, friend of friend, friend, etc?

This doesn't mean that your gmail contacts are non-private. I could have a private email address that I only use with close friends and a public one I use for signing up for services and business correspondence, etc. This misuse of contact information has already happened to me. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows all about who I know even though I have never had an account just because a number of my friends have signed up and pulled in their contacts from gmail.

Your complaint seems more like an argument for not allowing address book importing at all by any services. Which makes sense, actually, since I don't think address book exporting was meant to be sucked up by social networking services. It was meant to allow you to take your address book with you if you wanted to change email services.

And gmail doesn't want access to your friends list so they can import it into gmail, they want it for their forthcoming social networking product.