Why are Google and Facebook fighting to control our data?

Why are Google and Facebook fighting to control our data

?

Recently Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about what Google would do if Facebook would not permit the search company to access its data. He swiftly responded by saying "The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information." He didn't expand on that comment but at the end of last week Google made a change to its Gmail terms and conditions, banning companies from extracting Gmail user data unless they, in return, made their own data available to Google.

If so, it hasn't been entirely successful. For some time Facebook has allowed users to import their Gmail contacts and find those people on Facebook. Now that Google has prevented them from doing that, they've found a workaround asking users to download their contacts from Gmail themselves and then upload them to Facebook. Google responded by saying "We're disappointed that Facebook didn't invest their time in making it possible for their users to get their contacts out of Facebook. As passionate believers that people should be able to control the data they create, we will continue to allow our users to export their Google contacts."

That prompted a Facebook engineer, Mike Vernal, to respond with a strongly-worded comment pointing out that Google has previously blocked users of Orkut, the social network it owns, from exporting their contacts to Facebook. He wrote:"Openness doesn't mean being open when it's convenient for you. We strongly hope that Google turns back on their API and doesn't come up with yet another excuse to prevent their users from leaving Google products to use ones they like better instead."In truth, both companies can be criticised for the way they have handled user data in the past and both companies can claim to be acting in the best interests of their users this time. It's far from a clear-cut situation. This in my view illustrate that the battle to control our data is not just being fought between us and the technology companies we use, but also between those companies themselves.

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