Twitter, Vine, Voxer, MessageMe.
Facebook has repeatedly cut off competitors from its feature for finding your Facebook friends on their apps after jumpstarting its own social graph by convincing people to upload their Gmail contacts.
Meanwhile, Facebooks Download Your Information tool merely exports a text list of friends names you cant use elsewhere.As Congress considers potential regulation following Mark Zuckerbergs testimonies, it should prioritize leveling the playing field for aspiring alternatives to Facebook and letting consumers choose where to social network.
And as a show of good faith and argument against it abusing its monopoly, Facebook should make our friend list truly portable.Its time to free the social graph to treat it as a fundamental digital possession, the way the Telecommunications Act of 1996 protects your right to bring your phone number with you to a new network.The two most powerful ways to do this would be for Facebook to stop, or Congress to stop it from, blocking friend finding oncompetitors like its done in the past to Twitter and more.
And Facebook should change its Download Your Information tool to export our friend list in a truly interoperable format.
When you friend someone on Facebook, theyre not just a name.
Theyre someone specific amongst often many with the same name, and Facebook should be open to us getting connected with them elsewhere.Facebook takes data it wont giveWhile it continues til this day, back in 2010 Facebook goaded users to import their Gmail address books so they could add them as Facebook friends.
But it refused to let users export the email addresses of their friends to use elsewhere.
That led Google to change its policy and require data portability reciprocity from any app usingits Contacts API.So did Facebook back off No.
It built a workaround, giving users a deep link to download their Gmail contacts from Googles honorable export tool.
Facebook then painstakingly explained to users how to upload that file so it could suggest they friend all those contacts.Google didnt want to stop users from legitimately exporting their contacts, so it just put up a strongly worded warning to Gmail users: Trap my contacts now:Hold on a second.
Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that wont let you get it out .
.
.Although we strongly disagree with this data protectionism, the choice is yours.
Because, after all, you should have control over your data.
And Google offered to let you Register a complaint over data protectionism.Eight years later, Facebook has grown from a scrappy upstart chasing Google to become one of the biggest, most powerful players on the internet.
And its still teaching users how to snatch their Gmail contacts email addresses while only letting you export the names of your friends unless they opt-in through an obscure setting, because it considers contact info theyve shared as their data, not yours.
Whether you should be allowed to upload other peoples contact info to a social network is a bigger question.
But it is blatant data portability hypocrisy for Facebook to encourage users to import that data from other apps but not export it.In some respects, its good that you cant mass-export the email addresses of all your Facebook friends.
That could enable spamming, which probably isnt what someone had in mind when they added you as friend on Facebook.
They could always block, unfriend or mute you, but they cant get their email address back.
Facebook is already enduring criticism about how it handled data privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.Yet the idea that you could find your Facebook friends on other apps is a legitimate reason for the platform to exist.
Its one of the things thats made Facebook Login so useful and popular.
Facebooks API lets certain apps check to see if your Facebook friends have already signed up, so you can easily follow them or send them a connection request.
But Facebook has rescinded that option when it senses true competition.Data protectionismTwitter is the biggest example.
Facebook didnt and still doesnt let you see which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter, even though it has seven times as many users.
Twitter co-founder Ev Williams,frustrated in 2010, said that They see their social graph as their core asset, and they want to make sure theres a win-win relationship with anybody who accesses it.Facebook went on to establish a formal policy that said that apps that wanted to use its Find Friends tool had to abide by these rules:If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook.You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.Essentially, apps that piggybacked on Facebooks social graph had to let you share back to Facebook, and couldnt compete with it.
Its a bit ironic, given Facebooks overarching strategy for years has been replicate core functionality.
From cloning Twitters asymmetrical follow and Trending Topics to Snapchats Stories and augmented reality filters, all the way back to cribbing FriendFeeds News Feed and Facebooks start as a rip-off of the Winkleviis HarvardConnection.Restrictions against replicating core functionality arent unheard of in tech.
Apples iOS wont let you run an App Store from inside an app, for example.
But Facebooks selective enforcement of the policy is troubling.
Itsimply ignores competing apps that never get popular.
Yet if they start to grow into potential rivals, Facebook has swiftly enforced this policy and removed their Find Friends access, often inhibiting further growth and engagement.Here are few of examples of times Facebook has cut off competitors from its graph:Voxer was one of the hottest messaging apps of 2012, climbing the charts and raising a $30 million round with its walkie-talkie-style functionality.
In early January 2013, Facebook copied Voxer by adding voice messaging into Messenger.
Two weeks later, Facebookcut off Voxers Find Friends access.
Voxer CEO Tom Katis told me at the time that Facebook stated his app with tens of millions of users was a competitive social network and wasnt sharing content back to Facebook.
Katis told us he thought that was hypocritical.
By June, Voxer had pivoted toward business communications, tumbling down the app charts and leaving Facebook Messenger to thrive.MessageMe had awell-built chat appthat was growing quickly after launching in 2013, posing a threat to Facebook Messenger.
Shortly before reaching 1 million users,Facebook cut off MessageMes Find Friends access.
The app ended up selling for a paltry double-digit millions price tag to Yahoo before disintegrating.Phhhoto and its fate show how Facebooks data protectionism encompasses Instagram.
Phhhotos app that let you shoot animated GIFs was growing popular.But soon after it hit 1 million users, itgot cut off from Instagrams social graphin April 2015.
Six months later, Instagram launched Boomerang, a blatant clone of Phhhoto.
Within two years, Phhhoto shut down its app, blaming Facebook and Instagram.
We watched [Instagram CEO Kevin] Systrom and his product team quietly using PHHHOTO almost a year before Boomerang was released.
So it wasnt a surprise at all .
.
.Im not sure Instagram has a creative bone in their entire body.Vinehad a real shot at being the future of short-form video.
The day the Twitter-owned app launched, though, Facebook shut off VinesFind Friends access.
Vine let you share back to Facebook, and its six-second loops you shot in the app were a far cry from Facebooks heavyweight video file uploader.
Still, Facebook cut it off, and by late 2016, Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine.As I wrote in 2013, Enforcement of these policies could create a moat around Facebook.
It creates a barrier to engagement, retention, and growth for competing companies.
But in 2018, amongst whispers of anti-trust action, Facebook restricting access to its social graph to protect the dominance of its News Feed seems egregiously anti-competitive.Thats why Facebook should pledge to stop banning competitors from using its Find Friends tool.
If not, congress should tell Facebook that this kind of behavior could lead to more stringent regulation.Friends arent just namesWhen Senator John NeelyKennedy asked Zuckerberg this week, are you willing to give me the right to take my data on Facebook and move it to another social media platform, Zuckerberg claimed that Senator, you can already do that.
We have a Download Your Information tool where you can go get a file of all the content there, and then do whatever you want with it.But thats not exactly true.
You can export your photos that can be easily uploaded elsewhere.
But your social graph all those confirmed friend requests gets reduced to a useless string of text.
Download Your Information spits out merely a list of your friends names and the dates on which you got connected.
Theres no unique username.
No link to their Facebook profile.
Nothing you can use to find them on another social network beyond manually typing in their names.Thats especially problematic if your friends have common names.
There are tons of John Smiths on Facebook, so finding him on another social network with just a name will require a lot of sleuthing, or guess-work.
Depending on where you live, locating a particular Garcia, Smirnov or Lee could be quite difficult.
Facebook even built a short-lived feature called Friendshake to help you friend someone nearby amongst everyone in their overlapping name space.When I asked about this, Facebook told me that users can opt-in to having their email or phone number included in the Download Your Information export.
But this privacy setting is buried and little-known.
Just 4 percent of my friends, centered around tech savvy San Francisco, had enabled it.As I criticized way back in 2010 when Download Your Information launched, The data can be used as a diary, or to replace other information from a hard drive crash or stolen computer but not necessarily to switch to a different social network.Given Facebooks iron grip on the Find Friends API, users deserve decentralized data portability a way to take their friends with them that Facebook cant take back.
Thats what Download Your Information should offer, but doesnt.Social graph portabilityThis is why Im calling on Facebook to improve the data portability of your friend connections.
Give us the same consumer protections that make phone numbers portable.At the very least Facebook should include your friends unique Facebook username and URL.
But true portability would mean you could upload the list to another social network to find your friends there.One option would be for Facebooks export to include a privacy-safe, hashed version of your friends email address that they signed up with and share with you.
Facebook could build a hashed email lookup tool so that if you uploaded these nonsensical strings of characters to another app, they could cross-reference them against Facebooks database of your friends.
If theres a match, the app could surface that person as someone with whom you might want to reconnect.
Effectively, this would let you find friends elsewhere via email address without Facebook ever giving you or other apps a human-readable list of their contact info.If you cant take your social graph with you, theres little chance for a viable alternative to Facebook to arise.
It doesnt matter if a better social network emerges, or if Facebook disrespects your privacy, because theres nowhere to go.
Opening up the social graph would require Facebook to compete on the merit of its product and policies.
Trying to force the companys hand with a variety of privacy regulations wont solve the core issue.
But the prospect of users actually being able to leave would let the market compel Facebook to treat us better.For more on Facebooks challenges with data privacy, check out TechCrunchs feature stories: