Days after Google unveiled Friend Connect, which lets the sites of musicians, political campaigns and others incorporate profile data from several social networks, Facebook began to block the program. Google was taking advantage of the same tools that Facebook made available free to other outside developers, Facebook said Google was violating Facebook's restrictions on data sharing. This month, Google unveiled Friend Connect, which promises to pool profile data from Facebook, Google Talk, Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5, though not MySpace. The profile information gets incorporated into other sites - a political campaign, for instance, can build communities of supporters by tapping existing networks - with Google serving as the intermediary.

In a blog posting, Facebook developer Charlie Cheever said Google's Friend Connect "redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect."
Google responded, acknowledging it passes along data. But it said sharing is limited to links for profile photos of users and friends who have expressly consented to sharing with that particular site. The user's name and numeric ID on Facebook are replaced with Google's own identifiers, Google said in a company blog post.
Google also said it purges Facebook data from its systems every 30 minutes, more frequently than the 24 hours required by Facebook.