Facebooks ‘Removing The Ability To Pull Friends’ Data’

The why part here is important:

“Removing The Ability To Pull Friends’ Data
Facebook announced plans to stop letting developers pull data from users’ friends, such as their photos, birthdays, status updates, and checkins.

Why? Because the idea that anyone could give someone else’s data to a developer without their permission was always kind of shady. This should boost a perception of privacy on the Facebook platform, but also deny developers the ability to build apps like photo album browsers, search engines, calendars, and location maps that could compete with Facebook’s own products.”

Privacy leads to less data portability which in turn leads to potential monopoly rents.