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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> “If you are a Facebook user, you should never have to share your password, let anyone access your account, or do anything that might jeopardize the security of your account or violate the privacy of your friends,”

Weren't they, at one time, one of those sites trying to get your Gmail password/account so they could sniff out who your friends were?

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Yes but what was the reason behind it? They want your password so you can easily lookup who else from your contacts is using FB to simplify & accelerate your network connections' growth. Now, if they would do that AND at the same time make a copy of your emails OR use your emails content to "tag" you as someone who likes/dislikes certain brands/products/etc to better serve you ads now or in the future, that would be totally different jar of wax. AFAIK nothing like that transpired.

Yes. In fact, I'd argue that privacy invasion played one of the most important roles in the rapid rise of Facebook and LinkedIn

Privacy invasion? It has always explicitly said "enter your gmail username and password so we can import your contacts" or something equally obvious and transparent.

The privacy invasion is for the contacts who never consented to give Facebook their information.

Same thing with Viber and other apps. Some of friends use their services and now they have my contact information and can build up a shadow profile on me. I consented to none of that. While they may deny that's their intent it doesn't change the fact they have all that data.

Also, it contributes to a culture of "sure, I'll give you my login information".

What if the user had entered the contact info manually? Still an invasion of privacy?

In the extreme, this position gets really absurd. I never consented to allow gmail to store my email address in my friends' contact lists. At some point, "your" data becomes your friend's data and it's no longer yours to control.

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