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cm2012 • today at 4:52 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?

Here is Facebook's own CTO in 2010 on HN itself saying “First, we genuinely support data portability: we want users to be able to use their data in other applications without restriction.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440154


Replies

JimDabell • today at 6:41 AM

> Anything remotely related to data portability was verboten?

Yes. Please read the entire sentence before replying:

> All the early Facebook access revolved around engagement and anything even remotely related to data portability was verboten.

2010 is years after the Facebook platform was launched.

Regardless, as people in that thread pointed out at the time, what he is referring to is not data portability. If you were building on the Facebook platform at the time, you would know that apps had pretty much free reign to soak up the personal info but the main thing people cared about in terms of data portability was the ability to use the social graph outside of Facebook. Facebook hated the idea because it would allow competitors to bootstrap their own social graph without having to find and re-add all their friends, so it was the one thing that everybody knew could get you booted off the platform.

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