[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.