The battle for your data: Facebook and Google in GMail contacts row

Rivalry between Google and Facebook is intensifying, with the world’s two biggest internet companies locking horns over the export of user’s contact data from GMail to Facebook, with Google even encouraging its users to file a complaint against the social network.


Recently, Google blocked Facebook access to the GMail contacts API, saying that it would no longer let other services, including Facebook, automatically import its users’ email contact data for their own purposes, unless the information flows both ways.
This week, Facebook responded by offering users a work-around solution to Google’s block. It added a link, allowing users to first move their Gmail contacts to a PC and then upload them to Facebook.
“We’re disappointed that Facebook didn’t invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook,” a Google Spokesperson said. “As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts.”
In further response to Facebook’s work-around link, Google has issued a ‘warning’ to users.
Now when a Facebook user clicks on the ‘Download Your Contacts’ button on the Facebook import contact via GMail page, they are redirected to a new page on Google’s server, which has the following warning:
“Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out?
Here’s the not-so-fine print. You have been directed to this page from a site that doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends. So once you import your data there, you won’t be able to get it out. We think this is an important thing for you to know before you import your data there. Although we strongly disagree with this data protectionism, the choice is yours. Because, after all, you should have control over your data.”
Google then asks the user to file a complaint against this data protectionism and goes on to allow him to download his contacts.
The row has put the rivalry between the two firms in the spotlight.
Increasingly firms are making it easier for users to move their data around the web and from device to device.
Data-rich Facebook, with 500 million users, is one of the most sought-after sources of information, but it has been selective about who it will share data with.
While it has struck a deal with Microsoft to allow user data to power its Bing search engine, it has made no such arrangement with rival Google.