Google Removes Facebook Contacts–I Can’t Tell Who’s Evil Anymore

According to Engadget, Google has stripped Facebook contacts from integrating into the contacts list of the Nexus S after the most recent update. And this was intentionally done by Google. Before today, if you went into your contacts you’d see your local phone contacts as well as your Facebook contacts. Those Facebook contacts were not stored locally though. They were integrated through the cloud and onto your phone. Google had permitted this to happen in the past but now they’re enforcing the same rules to Facebook that would apply to other apps and requiring Facebook to use the contacts API and making the data local. Of course, this also gives Google your data and the ability to use it across other apps as well and that’s what Google does. On the other hand, Facebook is being a data whore. Well not entirely as they are letting you use the data on Android devices, just not store it locally (unless you used a third party tool to export it first). Oddly, this only applies to the Nexus S currently so if you want the pure Google experience this is what it amounts to…less. And apparently this rule doesn’t apply to Twitter contacts from what the comments suggest (but I’d have to know more about Android to confirm this is how it handles Twitter contacts).

Anyway, so many things we could say about this. Seems very odd to me that Google does this to one phone by revoking what they have across other devices. OK fine, Google is more evil here…I said it.