by RYAN SINGEL
Google — which has plenty of reasons to covet the rich mine of user data hidden behind Facebook’s walls — simply had enough.
“We have a data-liberation engineering team dedicated to building import and export tools for users. We are not alone. Many other sites allow users to import and export their information, including contacts, quickly and easily. But sites that do not, such as Facebook, leave users in a data dead end,” Google said in a statement. “[W]e will no longer allow websites to automate the import of users’ Google Contacts (via our API) unless they allow similar export to other sites.”
Google isn’t protecting its Gmail customers, who would do this as a convenience to themselves, and who must give Google explicit permission to allow it to happen anyway. It’s protecting its own long-term strategic interest in a relatively new battleground for what amounts to your online identity.
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