Odi's astoundingly incomplete notes
New entries | CodeMashup user experience and privacy
An email provider uses mail meta data to query Facebook and make suggestions to the user. This seems quite popular these days. GMX is doing it for instance. What happens to user experience when you create mashups like these?
To quote a friend of mine:
can this be? facebook searching through all my e-mails and suggesting new friends based on the mail adresses (which obviously are NOT in my address book)...??!!
You see what happens. It gives the user the impression that Facebook has access to his data! A pop-up from Facebook that contains data from the email provider can be very disturbing. Even though Facebook has no direct access to the email data, it looks to the user as if it had! No surprise that the user is having privacy concerns here.
Because the user suspects Facebook, he will check Facebook's privacy settings with no success. It is completely non-obvious that it's the email provider that is to blame here. And that the email provider must provide privacy controls to disable that.
To quote a friend of mine:
can this be? facebook searching through all my e-mails and suggesting new friends based on the mail adresses (which obviously are NOT in my address book)...??!!
You see what happens. It gives the user the impression that Facebook has access to his data! A pop-up from Facebook that contains data from the email provider can be very disturbing. Even though Facebook has no direct access to the email data, it looks to the user as if it had! No surprise that the user is having privacy concerns here.
Because the user suspects Facebook, he will check Facebook's privacy settings with no success. It is completely non-obvious that it's the email provider that is to blame here. And that the email provider must provide privacy controls to disable that.
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