Facebook Now Lets You Export Your Friends’ Email Addresses. Oh Yes.

For years I’ve been gathering friends on Facebook. People I barely know. Click Friend Request. Click. Click. All part of a master scheme of sending a fair amount of strangers pictures of testicles dressed up as Super Mario from random email addresses. The only sticking point is how to collate all of these email addresses. Facebook has given me a new tool of destruction, the ability to download all of my friends’ contact data. If they opt-in. Opt-in. Please.

Techcrunch:

It’s now possible to export your Facebook social graph. Your  real  social graph, complete with your friends’ emails, which means you can leave Facebook and import your social network into a rival site.

But only if your friends opt into it. And they won’t.

Facebook has quietly added a new feature to its Account Settings page, giving users the option to “Allow friends to include my email address inDownload Your Information“. Check it, and the next time your friend decides to download an archive of their Facebook data, they’ll get your email address too so they can stay in touch.

It’s an ingenious move on Facebook’s part that will help undermine arguments that it is holding users’ data hostage, while simultaneously ensuring that it keeps a firm grip on its massively valuable social graph.

Privacy. It’s so 1k-999.