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Facebook Bans Google Friend Connect

TechCrunch talks with Google and Facebook execs about Facebook's banning of Google Friend Connect earlier this week. For a quick refresher, Friend Connect is a data portability initiative from Google that allows users to upload their profile information from a social network like MySpace to a third-party site like a personal blog. Friend Connect is like a bridge from the social network to the third-party site, allowing in this case a user to interact with their MySpace friends from their blog.

So why did Facebook ban Friend Connect? According to Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, the social networking giant is concerned that Facebook has no relationship to the third-party site that's pulling the Facebook data. In other words, Facebook feels it's losing control of its content, and Google is acting as the middleman.

But Kelly also points out that users don't have control over Friend Connect data, either, so if they want to revoke permission to share data through the Google service, they have no way of doing so while visiting Facebook. Privacy is also a concern, Kelly adds. Facebook's privacy settings have no bearing once the data travels to a third party. Google would have to sort those privacy issues out.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »

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