Facebook
unilaterally deactivated a tool created by Open-Xchange that enabled Facebook users to control their
personal data and export and use it in any way they choose.
Made
available for free, the tool uses approved Facebook APIs and is not in
violation of any Terms and Conditions, as interpreted by the management of
Open-Xchange.
“If
you want to see what a future looks like where a single company controls your
personal data for its own profit, this is a glimpse,” said Rafael Laguna, CEO
of Open-Xchange.
“Clearly,
Facebook management does not want you to have the ability to take your personal
information outside their walls to, say, Google+ and will do everything in
their power to stop you, including violating their own terms and conditions,”
Laguna added.
According
to an email from Facebook,
We’re writing to inform you that your
app Connector for ox.io has been disabled for the following violations: You
cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user
consents to such use, but you can use connections between users who have both
connected to your application.”
Our expectation is that developers do not provide
users with poor experiences, such as those resulting from inappropriate or
misleading content, privacy and security vulnerabilities, and general spam in
the Stream, Requests, and elsewhere. We appreciate your commitment to improving
the application ecosystem on Platform,” Facebook added.
“From
a technical standpoint, Facebook’s claim of violation of terms is preposterous.
All we are doing is using the Facebook API to extract the last name and first
name fields. We are not parsing or scraping the email address. This is not
about user experience. It is about Facebook NOT wanting anyone to control their
personal information – except Facebook,” Laguna added.
Social
OX then employs the approved API’s from the social and business networks to
create address books for each of them. This data is then enhanced with the
contacts from the user’s email accounts that are already part of their
Open-Xchange account. This data from all networks and address books and all
contacts from emails is then merged into a central address book.
By
TelecomLead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
