Hey Paul

I am not saying I agree that Facebook users explicitly agreed to their details being harvested and moved around (barring something in the terms of use or Facebook privacy policy which I doubt). This is what I meant when I said there is more to that. There are likely privacy issues here as many people contend there. This is why I mentioned Jeremiah’s comments and referred to the Bill of Rights. If anything Plaxo’s script runs contrary to people’s rights in the Bill of Rights to own their activity stream and the list of people they connect to. This goes both ways and applies to the person who has a list of friends and the friends on that list. If I was Plaxo’s lawyer I would be having a very sobering chat with them about this.

That being said there is an argument that some people have implicitly agreed to share this information and to be linked to social networks elsewhere. If they didn’t want to be involved in other people’s social networks then they should perhaps have withheld their email addresses. Of course the prudent thing is not to take advantage of those people’s contact details without their permission and there is an argument that this should be the case with those services that search your address book for people you would like to join a given service.