[Silhouette]

That's not the point. Your friend made a decision to share their private data with you using Facebook, knowing that it was Facebook that would be holding the sensitive data. You are talking about sharing that data with other organisations, which your friend has no control over. The point isn't whether or not you trust those organisations, it's whether it's abusing the privilege of having access to your friend's data to spread that data around where they don't control it any more. I think doing so is, at best, a betrayal of confidence.

(Edit: And in answer to your other question, about which organisations I personally can trust, we have fairly strict laws in my country about privacy and data protection, which limit what any of these companies may legally do and give me various rights with regard to any personally identifiable data anyone holds about me. I don't think those laws go far enough, but IMHO they're certainly better than the free-for-all you seem to want. So I can have some confidence in how my data will be handled by any company operating in our jurisdiction, which immediately makes me more likely to trust them than US-based companies like Facebook and Google whose business models fundamentally rely on undermining privacy in ways that are rarely going to be in the interests of the exposed.)

[calloc]

My friend has shared their contact information on Facebook, I decide to contact them using my iPhone, and save their contact information. That now gets sync'ed from my phone to my Mac, which is sync'ed with Google because I use gmail for my main email account and I like to have all of my contact information also available from within gmail and more importantly google voice so that I know when people send me text messages and when they call me.

If my friends have trusted me with their information they also trust me to make sure to keep it safe. What service I use to store my data should not be of any consequence for them. That is the same way with this Facebook exporter (BTW, the iPhone app allows one to sync contacts from Facebook to the iPhone address book, which can then get sync'ed to .Mac, Me, or the new iCloud, from there back to a Mac and then back up to Google), it allows the user to get the data from Facebook and store it in their address book. Instead of having to go through each entry one by one this plugin automates the process.

I don't see how my friends that clearly have made this data available to me (so I could contact them) should now have a say as to how and where I store said data. Just because I decide to store it in my address book on Google doesn't make much if a difference, if they didn't want me to have that data in the first place they should have A. never have given it to me, or B. ask me to please remove their information.

[Silhouette]

I'm giving up on this thread now. The endless downvotes instead of replies and people missing the point are just disheartening.

One more time, for the record: Your friend trusted you with their personal data, not Google. You may not personally have a problem with sharing your own personal data with Google, but not everyone is like you, and some people do. That doesn't mean they have a problem with sharing the data with you in the first place or that it was somehow unreasonable of them to give it to you.

I really can't understand why so few people in this discussion seem to understand the distinction. We have multiple Acts of Parliament on the subject here in the UK and an entire government department whose primary responsibility is enforcing the rules, so I'm clearly not the only one who gets it or thinks it's important. Maybe it's a cultural/generational thing, and the average person on HN just sees the world differently or something. Then again, the average person on HN today downvotes rather than replying if they disagree, based on my experience in this discussion and what's happened to several other people in other discussions I've been following, so things have obviously gone way downhill.

[roldon332]

You really expect every one of your contacts to let you know before the buy an Android cell phone, or sign up for gmail or call you on google voice? What if one of your contacts doesn't trust ANY company other than Google? Using your logic, you shouldn't contact them on anything other than Google services.

[calloc]

Unfortunately I am unable to remember any and all of my friends contact information. I store it somewhere for easy retrieval when I need it.

[wnight]

Your phone number and email address were never meant to be secret. That only provides security by obscurity and leads to exactly this problem - you, a user, being upset when the security you were led to expect doesn't align with reality.

If you wish to not receive certain communications the way to do this is by screening incoming connections/contents. This works, unlike secrets.

Now, understanding that what you wanted to do (keep an email address secret) is a bad idea - it won't do what you want, you can see why those who understand don't care about this "privacy" - it isn't.

Claiming to authorize your email address being shared with CompanyX but not CompanyY is like saying "Here's my phone number, I'm only lettingVerizon subscribers know it, to keep AT&T from snooping on which of their users calls me." It's just nonsensical.