Facebook Tightens Privacy, Blocks Google’s Friend Connect Program

Posted by Vaibhav

May 29, 2008

As the competition heats up between the social networking sites, Google continues to face severe challenges from the likes of MySpace and Facebook, the top two community websites over the internet.

With Google’s Friend Connect, musicians, political campaigns and others can incorporate profile data from a number of social networks through their sites. However, just days after Friend Connect was launched, Facebook started blocking the program.

Facebook, which stands behind MySpace at the second place in social networking, claimed that Google was violating Facebook’s data sharing restrictions, although Google was taking advantage of the same tools that were offered by Facebook to other outside developers freely.

In November, Google had released OpenSocial, a consortium which allows developers to write applications for use on multiple social networks. To date, MySpace has joined while Facebook has not.

It was in this month that Google released Friend Connect, which promises to collect profile information from Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Talk, hi5 and Plaxo. However, the list does not include MySpace.

The profile data gets integrated into other sites. For example, a political campaign can bring the supporters together through a community by tapping existing networks, with Google as the intermediary.

However, Facebook was quick to object, as it cited privacy concerns and blocked the program. Formerly, Facebook had the authority to block a service if it believed that its rules were violated, when dealing one on one with a company, but with Google serving as the intermediary, Facebook had to lose that leverage.

Even though Google acknowledged that Friend Connect passes along data, it stated that the sharing is limited to links for profile images of users and friends who have specifically permitted to sharing with that particular site. It further said that the replacement of the user’s name and numeric ID on Facebook is made with Google’s own identifiers.

Google stated that it purges Facebook data every 30 minutes from its systems, which is more frequent than the required 24 hours by Facebook.

The networking giant has been facing problems related to privacy issues, most lately when it launched “Beacon”, a marketing tool that tracked purchases made by Facebook members on other sites and sent alerts about the transactions to their Facebook friends.

However, it cannot be said whether it is the privacy issue or the control issue that has made Facebook take such a step.

News