Hey everyone,
I wanted to share my findings with regard to this Facebook/phone contacts thing. I was searching around when this came out, but I didn't find anything describing what I was seeing with my phone and Facebook account. This is a slightly modified email I had sent to a friend. Sorry, I don't get into version code names, I'm a numbers guy.
The EVO comes with Facebook for HTC Sense. It shows your FB contacts in its People app and shows their profile pics and status updates as well. To my knowledge, this is a one-way sync, meaning FB contacts are shown on the phone, but phone/Gmail contacts are not provided to Facebook. I just checked the help doc on the phone and that seems to be what it indicates.
I believe the Facebook for Android app, on the other hand, is the culprit. But, it's complicated. I do in fact remember an option in the app to sync contacts. I disabled it because I was using the one for HTC Sense. In the app settings, there was an Other Settings section where you could configure this. That option is no longer available for me. It appears to be because of the Google/Facebook data portability spat. Google isn't enforcing it on anything but the Nexus S (running Android 2.3.3+) and other new devices like it.
I upgraded my phone to 2.3.3 recently, and I think that's why Facebook disabled the sync option. On a non-HTC phone that doesn't have native syncing like Facebook HTC Sense, the Facebook app would have shown your FB contacts in the phone's contact list, I believe. But because of the spat, I think they have removed this option. Whether it's only on 2.3.3+ devices or all of them I don't know.
While removing the option to sync FB contacts with your phone's contact list, they apparently DID NOT remove the option to sync your phone's contact list with FB, and they provided no way to disable that. That's probably a slap in the face of Google. Seeing as how I knew I had disabled syncing in the app in the past, I was stumped as to how it was doing it. I think this is what's going on. I'm pretty sure that had I gone into that contacts section on FB in the past, my phone's contacts would not have been there, at least until I did the upgrade and updated Facebook.
I don't remember what version of the FB app I was running. It was one of the 1.6.x flavors. I have since logged out of the app and uninstalled all updates. Not surprisingly, my phone's contacts have not been re-uploaded to Facebook.
I'd like someone who is not running 2.3.3, but has the latest version of the app, to see if they have the option to disable syncing. I'd like to know if Facebook is checking the Android version or if they eliminated that option for everyone. The fact that they eliminated the option to sync, yet still continue to do so, is annoying.
