The Facebook vs. Google battle of exporting and importing contacts and email addresses still goes on. In a post by Michael Arrington entitled “Facebook/Google Slap Fight: ‘Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient’ “, he stated that Facebook’s engineer, Mike Vernal left a comment on the site saying:

Our policy has been consistent. The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information. Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.

If this policy is true then why does Yahoo export email addresses to Facebook, same as true with Microsoft. The answer is “business”. According to Danny Sullivan in his “Facebook: You’ve No Right To Export Email Addresses (Unless It’s To Yahoo & Microsoft)”:

Suffice to say, you cannot bring your Facebook contacts into Gmail, as you can with Yahoo and Microsoft. Thus, the issue clearly isn’t that Facebook doesn’t think you have the right to mass export emails. It seems that Facebook simply doesn’t want you to mass export them into Google — not unless, I suppose, it gets a business deal with Google. And if it doesn’t want to do a deal, then those emails don’t get to go. They aren’t yours. They belong to Facebook, and can only be exported to the business partners that Facebook agrees with.