Facebook has been in the news for a lot of reasons off late. On the up-side for the social networking website, there have been upgrades like bulk tagging, high-resolution pictures, and a couple of new security features. On the down-side, as usual, Facebook has been hit by security concerns. This time, Facebook applications were found to leak out user IDs to companies. with these new allegations, Facebook had to block LOLapps temporarily, while a law suit was filed against Zynga, one of Facebook’s leading application developers. These security concerns hardly seemed to have ruffled Mark Zuckerberg & Co.’s feathers as Facebook now lets you update your contact list from Gmail and Orkut.
[photo facebook-gmail]
Integrating Gmail And Orkut with Facebook
So just like every other day, I was on Facebook the nth time since morning when something interesting caught my eye. Just above my news feed, there was a Friend Finder notification which told me that the application now worked with Gmail and Orkut (see pic above). This definitely raised my curiosity. If I am not mistaken, Google is supposed to be working on the biggest competition for Facebook in Google Me. So then how could this be happening?
Google warnings
I decided to look into this just like any other inquisitive person and took the bait and clicked on Find Friends. On doing so, I found the above warning (see pic above). Google warned me that Facebook was trying to access my Google Contacts and Orkut. I wanted to learn more on what was happening for sure so I hit learn more and the following screen came up.
Important question: do you trust Facebook?
In the first and the second Google links that popped up, one sentence that caught my eye was, “Grant access only if you trust the website”. This made me think. I do have pictures of myself on Facebook that my family wouldn’t be proud of, but apart from pictures the trust in the social networking website has gone down thanks to the recent allegations. Facebook going through my Google Contacts, or Orkut (though I don’t use it any more), was not something I was comfortable with and I denied Facebook access.
What about you? Do you want Facebook nosing around your Google Contacts or Orkut?
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