Beware of Facebook Address Book Importer

July 18th, 2009 by Prateek Dayal | Print Beware of Facebook Address Book Importer

I tried importing my gmail address book into Facebook today using their friend finder and it showed me about 500 contacts that I can add as friends. I scanned the whole list and selected contacts that I know well and hit the invite button. In the summary, I was shown about thousand extra contacts (including some mailing lists, some old university addresses) that the invitation were sent to. I got some 5 invitations myself, sent to different email aliases I have. I don’t even remember seeing those email addresses (including my own aliases) in the list of contacts shown to me.

I wonder why a company like Facebook has such a misleading invitation mechanism. When Facebook says that you have X contacts that you can add as friend and shows their photo next to their names, anyone would assume that these are people already on Facebook. Turns out a lot of these people are not on Facebook and there is no separate list of contacts who are not on FB, but can be invited (which is a common two step invitation practice followed by sites like Twitter/LinkedIn etc).

If you have received an invite to join Facebook from me, please accept my apologies and ignore it. I did not mean to send even a single invite. I have never even invited all my contacts to Muziboo, my own startup so I particularly hate being labeled as a spammer when FB spams on my behalf.  Thanks so much FB for breaching my trust!

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 5:18 am and is filed under facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • http://twitter.com/indimeme indimeme

    Beware of Facebook Address Book Importer: Prateek Dayal I tried importing my gmail address book into Facebook to.. http://bit.ly/4nhM8C
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://twitter.com/indimeme indimeme

    Beware of Facebook Address Book Importer: Prateek Dayal I tried importing my gmail address book into Facebook to.. http://bit.ly/4nhM8C

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  • http://www.enidhi.net/ Shrinidhi Hande

    Thanks for the alert.
    May be it is better to do it manually or try on a dummy ID with few sample contacts before blindly revealing our gmail password…
    This comment was originally posted on http://www.prateekdayal.net/blog)” rel=”nofollow”>Prateek Dayal

  • http://www.enidhi.net Shrinidhi Hande

    Thanks for the alert.

    May be it is better to do it manually or try on a dummy ID with few sample contacts before blindly revealing our gmail password…

  • http://www.enidhi.net/ Shrinidhi Hande

    Thanks for the alert.

    May be it is better to do it manually or try on a dummy ID with few sample contacts before blindly revealing our gmail password…

    This comment was originally posted on http://www.prateekdayal.net/blog)“>Prateek Dayal

  • http://www.enidhi.net Shrinidhi Hande

    Thanks for the alert.

    May be it is better to do it manually or try on a dummy ID with few sample contacts before blindly revealing our gmail password…

  • http://seotipsdaily.blogspot.com/ Buvanesh

    Nice information for the Faceboook users…Hope here after they will be careful while using this Address Book Importer service….Good Job :)
    This comment was originally posted on http://www.prateekdayal.net/blog)” rel=”nofollow”>Prateek Dayal

  • http://seotipsdaily.blogspot.com/ Buvanesh

    Nice information for the Faceboook users…Hope here after they will be careful while using this Address Book Importer service….Good Job :)

  • http://seotipsdaily.blogspot.com/ Buvanesh

    Nice information for the Faceboook users…Hope here after they will be careful while using this Address Book Importer service….Good Job :)

    This comment was originally posted on http://www.prateekdayal.net/blog)“>Prateek Dayal

  • http://seotipsdaily.blogspot.com/ Buvanesh

    Nice information for the Faceboook users…Hope here after they will be careful while using this Address Book Importer service….Good Job :)

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    This comment was originally posted on http://www.prateekdayal.net/blog)“>Prateek Dayal

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    Thanks for your information about facebook. Warning messages to all… Thanks

  • http://netonet.wordpress.com/ Rafijan S

    Thanks for your information about facebook. Warning messages to all… Thanks
    This comment was originally posted on http://www.prateekdayal.net/blog)” rel=”nofollow”>Prateek Dayal

  • http://netonet.wordpress.com/ Rafijan S

    Thanks for your information about facebook. Warning messages to all… Thanks

    This comment was originally posted on http://www.prateekdayal.net/blog)“>Prateek Dayal

  • http://netonet.wordpress.com Rafijan S

    Thanks for your information about facebook. Warning messages to all… Thanks

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  • http://www.trimobilephone.com Michelle

    Hey this is a common problem being faced my every face book users, even i agree that if we are selecting few people invite should be passed on to them only, but unfortunately their developers made a big mistake in coding or understanding the logic. Well it is again a strategy where FB can have large number of people connected at their site. FB is just concerned about increasing their clients , rather then marinating the existing clients. Disappointed, anyhow keep writing more, nice to hear from you.

  • http://www.trimobilephone.com Michelle

    Hey this is a common problem being faced my every face book users, even i agree that if we are selecting few people invite should be passed on to them only, but unfortunately their developers made a big mistake in coding or understanding the logic. Well it is again a strategy where FB can have large number of people connected at their site. FB is just concerned about increasing their clients , rather then marinating the existing clients. Disappointed, anyhow keep writing more, nice to hear from you.

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