Wednesday, July 27, 2011

What are your rights regarding personal email? [Extra Bit]

[Are Facebook Saints?]

Just adding an extra point to my recent Blog post.

The question I posed in my last post about email sharing was triggered by Facebook stating that it is wrong for a person to mass move private details such as email addresses and telephone number etc to a new service provider without the person knowing. It is an interesting (and perhaps valid) argument which covers up what they would rather say which is "please don't move your Facebook contacts to our competition and set up an ecosystem (there must be a better word) there."

The point is that Facebook, through its partnership with Skype is forcing its users to do just what it is telling them they should not do with Google Plus.

I haven't used the Skype functionality in Facebook as yet so I'm not sure exactly how it works but from what I've read, once you use it once to chat through voice or video to a contact, it creates them as a contact in Skype. Essentially, by you chatting to someone over Facebook Video, you are creating a link to someone in Skype where one didn't exist before.

This really is very similar to what Facebook is arguing you shouldn't do by using automated ways of exporting Facebook contacts to create contacts in Google Plus.

Facebook is a business so one shouldn't be surprised when they choose profit over strange ethics but then expecting their users to abide by these ethics is a bit hypocritical.