I'm not sure who these nebulous "many people have mentioned" are in your post, but the TechCrunch post you are addressing specifically states at the end: "Facebook has claimed in the past that there are sensitive issues around exporting contact information. But that hasn’t stopped it from pulling in whatever data it can. And it has also forged deals with both Hotmail and Yahoo that will let those services access its contact data. Google didn’t do a partnership with Facebook, so it doesn’t get the goods."

The TechCrunch post was certainly not arguing that one couldn't export to Yahoo. Indeed, that is exactly what Google is in a fuss about.

Fair point. I linked to the TechCrunch story as it was the first to report Google's move, not as the basis for people saying you couldn't export contacts. Perhaps "many" overstated the situation, but I've seen it come up on Twitter and in various articles; see, for instance, http://gigaom.com/2010/11/05/nice-move-google-what-took-you-... Also, Arrington's follow-up mentioned that Facebook has "pretty much refused to let users export social graph data" (http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/05/data-protectionism-begins-i...) It's been my general experience that people don't seem to be aware of the Yahoo trick, and since the Google story has people talking once again about what data you can get out of Facebook, I thought it would be a good time to bring it up.

This is cool, but it mostly illustrates the danger of allowing random people you don't know to be your friends. If they can export all of their contact's emails, then you'll be on who knows how many spam lists.