INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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, Facebook’s Download Your Information tool merely exports a text list of friends’ names you can’t use elsewhere.As Congress
considers potential regulation following Mark Zuckerberg’s 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.It’s 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 on competitors like it’s 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, they’re not just a name
They’re 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 won’t 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 using its Contacts API.So did Facebook back off
It built a workaround, giving users a deep link to download their Gmail contacts from Google’s honorable export tool
Facebook then painstakingly explained to users how to upload that file so it could suggest they friend all those contacts.Google didn’t
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 won’t 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
And it’s 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 they’ve shared as their data, not yours
Whether you should be allowed to upload other people’s 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, it’s good that you can’t mass-export the email addresses of all your Facebook friends
That could enable spamming, which probably isn’t what someone had in mind when they added you as friend on Facebook
They could always block, unfriend or mute you, but they can’t 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
It’s one of the things that’s made Facebook Login so useful and popular
Facebook’s API lets certain apps check to see if your Facebook friends have already signed up, so you can easily follow them or send them
But Facebook has rescinded that option when it senses true competition.Data protectionism
Twitter is the biggest example
Facebook didn’t and still doesn’t let you see which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter, even though it has seven times as many
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 there’s 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 Facebook’s social graph had to let you share back to Facebook, and couldn’t compete with it
It’s a bit ironic, given Facebook’s overarching strategy for years has been “replicate core functionality.” From cloning Twitter’s
asymmetrical follow and Trending Topics to Snapchat’s Stories and augmented reality filters, all the way back to cribbing FriendFeed’s
News Feed and Facebook’s start as a rip-off of the Winklevii’s HarvardConnection.Restrictions against replicating core functionality
aren’t unheard of in tech
Apple’s iOS won’t let you run an App Store from inside an app, for example
But Facebook’s selective enforcement of the policy is troubling
It simply 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, Facebook cut off Voxer’s 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 wasn’t 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 a well-built chat app that was growing quickly after launching in 2013, posing a threat to Facebook Messenger
Shortly before reaching 1 million users, Facebook cut off MessageMe‘s 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
Facebook’s data protectionism encompasses Instagram
Phhhoto’s app that let you shoot animated GIFs was growing popular. But soon after it hit 1 million users, it got cut off from
Instagram’s social graph in 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 wasn’t a surprise at all
. I’m not sure Instagram has a creative bone in their entire body.”Vine had a real shot at being the future of short-form video
The day the Twitter-owned app launched, though, Facebook shut off Vine’s Find Friends access
Vine let you share back to Facebook, and its six-second loops you shot in the app were a far cry from Facebook’s heavyweight video file
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.That’s 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 aren’t just namesWhen
Senator John Neely Kennedy 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
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
There’s 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.That’s 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
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
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 Facebook’s iron grip on the Find Friends API, users deserve decentralized
data portability — a way to take their friends with them that Facebook can’t take back
That’s what Download Your Information should offer, but doesn’t.Social graph portabilityThis is why I’m 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
Facebook’s 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 Facebook’s database of your friends
If there’s 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 can’t take your social graph with you, there’s little chance for a viable alternative to Facebook to
It doesn’t matter if a better social network emerges, or if Facebook disrespects your privacy, because there’s 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 company’s hand with a variety of privacy regulations won’t solve the core issue
