• CNET, Tuesday, July 5, 2011 12:35 PM

A developer is claiming that Facebook has blocked his tool, which he designed to let people extract the information that their friends have shared with them. "Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends," blogged Mohamed Mansour, developer of the Facebook Friend Exporter, a Chrome extension that automates the data extraction process. The tool lets people save their contacts' e-mail addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information into a text file or to directly import them into Gmail.

"That makes it much easier for Google account holders to rebuild their contact network at Google+," notes CNet. "The activities surrounding the export tool spotlights the value of the data contained in social networks," its adds. "Google believes people should be able to extract information about their contacts. It therefore provides tools to let people do so, whereas Facebook only provides a tools to let people extract what they themselves have into the network.

Mansour, meanwhile, says he's working a new version of his tool, explaining: "I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every user's data on Facebook. You don't own anything!"

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