Plaxo isn’t the issue here. The issue is whether or not a user should be able to easily retrieve data they have been given access to by another user on Facebook. Data that you can’t use in Facebook unless you can get it out and put it into your address book.

When you share your email address with others then you are giving them the option of using it. If they use it in a fashion you don’t agree with then you should do a better job of picking your friends.

If you have data available on your profile, and you then add someone as a friend, you give them permission to view that data.

Does that mean you then need to give them separate permission to use that data to email you? Or to phone you?

Personally I’ve always avoided Plaxo due to the mail I’ve had from contacts using it. But a friend of mine is using it for their contacts, and they put my publicly available details in there, the issue is between me and them, and not with Facebook or Plaxo. And the issue is probably limited to:

1. Deciding who I want to see the information in the first place, and whether I think they’ll misuse it.

2. Deciding whether to contact that person privately, and ask them to remove my contact details from a service that annoys me.

That said, Plaxo scares me because I don’t trust it not to message my entire contact list without my permission. I don’t care what Plaxo does with *my* email address, however. I can always setup a rule to filter evil Plaxo messages out. (That’s why whenever I signup at a site, I use [theirdomainname]@[mydomain].com — makes it real easy to tell who is selling my email address!)

I support Facebook’s position because it’s their company/website and they were clear in their terms of service what you can and cannot do. They also re-enabled Scoble’s account, so no one is out anything.

Back in the beginning, Facebook allowed you to export your contacts’ information as a CSV. I thought that was handy. I still think it would be handy. If you don’t want your information out there, don’t put it on your profile, or only friend people you REALLY trust.

Your email address is not your DNA, folks!

IANAL, but in Google gmail program polcies (http://mail.google.com/mail/help/program_policies.html) , it is said that:

Prohibited Actions

In addition to (and/or as some examples of) the violations described in Section 3 of the Terms of Use, users may not:
…/…
- selling, exchanging or distributing to a third party the email addresses of any person without such person’s knowing and continued consent to such disclosure

Is it not what FriendFinder is doing ?

It’s ok to say that we don’t like Plaxo and/or Scoble - but that ‘kerfuffle’ is not the good reason.

However, I am very glad that Facebook has stepped in to ensure that MY data is kept secure. I gave Robert permission to see my data within the Facebook interface, not to extract it and give it over to a third party.

Digidave,

It may be that you don’t LIKE Facebook’s Terms and Conditions.

You have a right to dislike them.

You have a right to choose whether to use the service or not.

Want you don’t have a right to do is blithely break them when it doesn’t suit.

And for what it’s worth, here in the UK, extracting data from a web service in a way that breaks the site’s T&Cs is a CRIMINAL offence carrying up to 2 years in prison. I think that Scoble ought to be glad he’s American this afternoon

You write you don’t want Scoble putting your contact info into Plaxo, but he can do that without the bot. Anybody with your contact info can put it into whatever service they want. If they use Plaxo to manage their 50,000 2.0 identities, that sucks for you. If they use another service, and are indeed your friend who you want to give your contact info to, well your support of the Facebook TOS here makes it a pain in the ass for me to gather/keep up-to-date with all my friends’ contact info, which I may want to put into a harmless address book app, but am not going to spend 5 hours cutting and pasting to get it done.

A pox on Scoble for using Plaxo, perhaps, but a pox on Facebook too for preventing easy info gathering, which is what these 2.0 services are all about. Staying networked.

Facebook is a company too. They might have better PR and feel more useful than Plaxo — but they are a company nonetheless and they do data mining all the time - the “friend finder” application.

To me it sounds like their TOS are: We can collect all the data we want from outside sources, but once we have that data - we won’t share it.

I understand the fear here — that Plaxo will spam you. But guess what, one man’s spam is another mans treasure. Some might consider a request to Join Facebook, a spam message.

Unless you have a contract with Robert that prohibits him from sharing your email address (which you gave him) with other people I’m pretty sure this doesn’t violate any rights. What you are really angry at is that Robert took liberties with the personal information you gave him.

He could easily have just had an intern type them into his Plaxo account and avoided using a bot all together. The result would be the same as would the fault.

Sean

By the way, by submitting this comment, my email is now stored on your server … isn’t that violating also my ‘right to privacy’ ? I don’t see any TOS here which clearly states that you “wouldn’t use it without my permission”.