Facebook goes behind your back to present your profile to people you've chosen not to friend
Hot on the heels of Facebook's big username land-grab comes news that Facebook may be using the email addresses you import even after you choose not to add them as friends.
The issue occurs if and when you let Facebook search your email contacts for people to invite to become your Facebook friend. As part of this process Facebook will list every contact you have that is already on Facebook, and offer you the chance to "friend" them all at once. You can choose to uncheck the ones that you don't want to friend, essentially skipping them, or choose to skip all of them.
While Facebook makes it clear that they will not store the password for your email account, what they don't make so clear is that they will store the addresses of everyone it found in your email account and keep them associated with you, even the ones that you chose to skip.
So how does Facebook use this information? They present you as a possible contact to the people that you skipped - even if that person has never shown Facebook a connection of any kind to you. Nice, eh? Effectively, Facebook is ignoring your preference to not contact these people by going behind your back to ask them if they want to friend you.
Now, obviously any social network needs to grow by connecting as many people as possible, but in my opinion both Facebook and Twitter get it wrong by publishing friend (or in the case of Twitter, follower) totals. This encourages people to friend as many people as possible so that they appear more popular, even if those connections are tenuous at best. While this makes the service seem more popular, it actually greatly decreases the value of those connections (something I'm sure all the self-proclaimed "social media experts/consultants/evangelists" would disagree with).
Even worse now, Facebook is using your contact information far enough after the point when you actually allowed it access that it really feels unscrupulous. Couple that with the fact that by using your information in this way Facebook is blatantly ignoring your preferences (to not contact certain people), and Facebook is really appearing to want us not to trust them.
By the way, the only way currently to block this behavior on Facebook's part is to set your privacy settings to not allow your profile to show up in searches. It's ridiculous to liken Facebook actively showing your profile to people who have possibly never shown any sort of connection to you to people actively searching for your account.
Are Facebook in the wrong here? Technically, I suppose not. You do have to give them permission to search your contacts. But it sure as hell feels wrong, and when it comes to building a community that's just as important.
I hope abusing its users' trust is valuable enough to Facebook to warrant the risk to their reputation.
