This is why people let Google Contacts and iCloud "have a free pass". Neither Google Contacts nor iCloud does anything with my data - it's on their servers for backup and sync purposes. Could they be doing anything nefarious in the background with my private information? Sure, but neither company have a strong history of this.
With Facebook this trust simply does not exist, and when coupled with a poorly explained, poorly documented feature that seemed to have very few privacy controls around it (many Facebook features with less privacy impact have more privacy visibility), people flip out. Rightly so.
We cannot trust Facebook not to mine the shit out of the information uploaded from our phonebooks (and in fact, Facebook has never ruled this out), and eventually expose it to other people, even indirectly. When your company has a long track record of taking a cavalier (if not outright dismissive) attitude towards user privacy, the onus is on you to show you're above-board. The phone sync feature hasn't done this due diligence.
The fact that the phonebook data I'd be uploading isn't exposed directly to my other friends is very, very small comfort.
[edit] I've seen this exchange way more times than I'd like to. It's just a total failure of communication on Facebook's part:
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/l94s0/facebook_has_gone...
This is why people let Google Contacts and iCloud "have a free pass". Neither Google Contacts nor iCloud does anything with my data - it's on their servers for backup and sync purposes. Could they be doing anything nefarious in the background with my private information? Sure, but neither company have a strong history of this.
With Facebook this trust simply does not exist, and when coupled with a poorly explained, poorly documented feature that seemed to have very few privacy controls around it (many Facebook features with less privacy impact have more privacy visibility), people flip out. Rightly so.
We cannot trust Facebook not to mine the shit out of the information uploaded from our phonebooks (and in fact, Facebook has never ruled this out), and eventually expose it to other people, even indirectly. When your company has a long track record of taking a cavalier (if not outright dismissive) attitude towards user privacy, the onus is on you to show you're above-board. The phone sync feature hasn't done this due diligence.
The fact that the phonebook data I'd be uploading isn't exposed directly to my other friends is very, very small comfort.
[edit] I've seen this exchange way more times than I'd like to. It's just a total failure of communication on Facebook's part:
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/l94s0/facebook_has_gone...