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Comment by akozak | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the difference is very important. I've almost never manually added a contact into Google and my contacts list has been built up by years of correspondence. In a sense, the people I've been emailing determine which address shows up in my contacts list.

In any case, even if there is a big difference, you haven't really said why the debate hinges on a failure to understand it.

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No, you don't understand the distinction portman is making. It's not between "type in email myself" vs "harvest from email", i.e. a question of data entry. It's a question of management. With Google Contacts, I'm the one that updates an email address if someone else's address changes. With Facebook, all I manage is the list of contacts, while the contact manages their own email address. Which means that when someone changes their email address, I don't need to either know or care. And crucially, if someone I email infrequently changes their email, there's no danger that I "miss the window" and lose the contact entirely.

That's a pretty big difference.

It is a pretty big difference, but I still don't see how failing to understand it on google's part (and they probably do understand it) is the source of all this.

Language like this makes me think they don't understand:

"essentially locking up your contact data about your friends"

Note the first 'your' in that sentence: From Google's P.O.V., the email address of your friend is your data. From Facebook's P.O.V, the email address of your friend is not your data -- it's the friend's data.

But Facebook will allow me to export that friend's data to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Doesn't that seem to completely contradict Facebook's entire stance?

Does sending you a mail message gives you an implicit moral permission to upload my mail address to a third party web-site?

Does adding you as a friend on a social network site gives you an implicit moral permission to upload my "visible to friends" data to a third party web-site?

I guess what you are saying is that the answer to these two questions need not be the same.

[ The fact that Facebook will let you export my data to Yahoo (which will let you re-export it to anyone, just like GMail) kind of indicates that it is not the fine distinction above that governs Facebook's actions. ]

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