Google battles with Facebook over data protection

Back in October we wrote a blog on the Just Search UK site entitled “The Bing and Facebook Partnership Gives Google Competition”. In this post we talked about how the partnership between Facebook and Bing has become ever stronger, with Bing now incorporating Facebook features into its search results.

This partnership was an obvious threat to Google and now the battle between Google and Facebook has heated up even further with the argument now being directed at data protection.

Google have always allowed users to export their contact data, and many have done so in order to import it into Facebook. Google’s argument is, that Facebook does not allow its users to do the same i.e. once users have imported data into Facebook they cannot re-export it.

To fight back, Google blocked API access preventing users from importing their data into Facebook. Facebook however found a work around to this by allowing users to export contacts via Gmail and upload them to the Facebook website.

Google’s response to this is shown in the screenshot below. Basically, if you try to export your Google contacts information into Facebook today you will be presented with a new screen which is essentially a petition against Facebook’s stance on data protectionism.

It warns users about Facebook and the inability to export data from it. It doesn’t go as far as to stop users from exporting their data to the social network but it has definitely heated things up between the two internet giants.

Why is Google doing this?

The bottom line – There are a few points:

• Facebook has a lot of data that Google wants. It has now almost reached 600 million registered users and gathers lots of data from all over the internet of what these users do.
• Facebook is the second most visited site in the US and has become a major competitor to Google. Their growth was seen a long time ago and Google could have made the policy change sooner. However what really ticked Google was the deal Microsoft signed with Facebook last month to allow Microsoft to access Facebook’s data, which Microsoft will start to display in Bing. Google had previously mentioned Bing as their biggest competitor, not Facebook.
• During 3Q, Facebook had more impressions of their display ads than Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Almost all of Google’s revenue comes from ads and so Google will do everything it can to stop any company from harming it in this way.
• Finally, Facebook owns a social market that the search giant is yet to capture.

What are the implications?

Google have never played as hard as they have here and so are now starting to show their strength. A simple change in their policy has a heavy effect on companies at a global level. The change also indicates the weight of Google “Want”. Google is after the data Facebook holds and wants to display that data in their SERPs. Why so desperate? Bing is able to show this data and Google knows this will make a lot of heavy Facebook users switch to Bing!

Is it too late?

So is all this too late in the day for Google? Is the partnership between Bing and Facebook a legitimate threat? Facebook is the second most utilised site on the web and an increasing number of its members are using the search feature, now powered by Bing. Google obviously feel threatened by this but is it now too late to try and battle back, and should they have seen the potential in Facebook a lot sooner?

Authors: Gemma Neesham and Ahmed Bhula.