The extension, which only works when Facebook is set to the English language, essentially extracts data for each of your Facebook friends that they have shared with you (name, emails, phone numbers, screen names, websites, address, and birthday). more motivation to figure out a different approach. You don't own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again. I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You gave them your friends and allowed them to store that data, and you have right to take it back out! Facebook doesn't own my friends.Īfter he found out that Facebook was throttling the email field once his extension got popular, he wrote the following on his Google+ profile: Get *your* data contact out of Facebook, whether they want you to or not. Mansour doesn't care about this, as he says in the extension's description: You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission. Nothing else is."Īs CNET points out, Facebook Friend Exporter technically violates Facebook's Terms of Service. "Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity.
"Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you," Mansour told me in an e-mail.
He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed. Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. Facebook clearly noticed a spike in usage (the extension now has more than 17,000 users), and decided to block it. Just bear with me.įacebook Friend Exporter wasn't designed with Google+ in mind (version 1 was in fact released in November 2010), but it has exploded in the past week as Google+ beta users look for ways to port over all their Facebook friends to Google+. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. New version with a different design is currently deploying. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. Mansour noticed, and posted the following message on the extension's page:įacebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. Because it got popular recently, Facebook noticed and began to block the extension. Facebook Friend Exporter is a Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour, an open source software engineer, that lets you grab all the information about your Facebook friends so you can import them elsewhere.
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