WebProNews

Looking to not repeat the privacy panic occurring when the company launched Beacon, Facebook has excused itself from participation in Google's recently unveiled Friend Connect.

On the Facebook Developers blog, Charlie Cheever says Friend Connect, Google's Open Social-based program allowing webmasters to integrate social networking features on their sites, doesn't measure up privacy-wise:

…we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

Google launched Friend Connect soon after Facebook released Facebook Connect, which was released shortly after MySpace launched its own service called Data Availability. All aim to integrate features of those networks into other sites.