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It was nice to see the recent Robert Scoble - Facebook email-scraping incident re-engergize the call for facebook to open up its user data, but it also brought to the forefront an more interesting side issue:

"When you 'friend' someone in social networking sites, what permissions do you give them to use the data on your profile pages?"

Jeremiah Owyang, Michael Arrington, and Loren Feldman have raised the issue that taking the email of a Facebook "friend" and exporting it to another contact web-app violates the "friend" privacy. Their underlying argument goes that a Facebook "friending" only gives the friend permission to use the data within Facebook. I argue that this is not realistic and that the "friend" permission should be considered more broadly to connecting in a number of different ways.

I argue that Facebook information is no different from a business card. When I hand you a business card, it serves as identification and a call to contact with me for business purposes. Facebook is a connection medium; common sense demands that the permissions extend to connecting. There are practical reasons supporting a broader definition of permission than advocated by the above people. If we put conditions that everytime we try to anything with our "friend's" personal data that they made available to us we need user permission, the system will become unwieldy.

I am not arguing for broad use rights; just a call for common sense. If someone "friends" you on Facebook, you can use their information to connect with them (even using another service like Plaxo). They may not spam you or sell your email addresses to a third party, but certainly they can connect with you. And that is what Plaxo would allow Scoble to do. I think these calls for user permission are a knee-jerk reaction to the automated nature of scraping 5000 Facebook friends. What is the difference from manually entering the email address listed on Facebook and scraping it using a Plaxo tool? I think this is a good discussion, but I don't want to see it dominated a immediate gut reaction.