In a post on Facebook's Developers blog, Charlie Cheever says it's banning Google's Friend Connect to protect its users' privacy -- and, by the way, it violates Facebook's terms of service for developers. He writes:
Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we've had a chance to evaluate the technology. We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we've been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we've had to suspend Friend Connect's access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We've reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.
There's a fairly heated debate going on about who's right and who's wrong at sites such as TechCrunch, with the most recent post here.
Facebook, of course, has its own plans for Facebook Connect....
