Facebook Decides Not To Connect Friends With Google

ReputationDefender recently caught wind of this VentureBeat post that deals with Online Identity Management and Internet Privacy concerns.

Facebook had planned to work on the “Friend Connect” product with Google, but now it seems they’ve mothballed it. A post from Facebook’s developer blog explained that they have ceased working on Google’s “Friend Connect” project because of a violation of internal terms of service.

Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology, […] We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

Of course, the first thing we thought when we read this was “You mean you didn’t take a look at the project before you partnered up?” I mean, you couldn’t spare one engineer for an hour or two to look at this?

Facebook’s chief privacy officer Chris Kelly shed some light on the matter when said in an interview with CNET News.com that his company never actually had a formal partnership with Google in Friend Connect. “There wasn’t participation to start with. That was sort of a mis-impression that may have been formed by their release,” he said. “We weren’t briefed on how the Friend Connect product was going to work.”

Interesting move. Facebook has always maintained that they are all about the privacy of their users, and this move seems to reinforce that. But the boys over at Google disagree with the argument put forth stating: “We think that Friend Connect at all steps puts users in control of their own data, at every step of the way, and we’re disappointed that Facebook disabled their users’ ability to use Friend Connect with their Facebook friends.”

Can’t we all just get along?

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