Headline: "People outraged at feature they actively enabled".

Probably a better headline is something like "People moderately surprised at something that sorta makes sense after a reminder".

"actively enabled" doesn't necessarily mean "actively conscient of the full consequences"

This is more than bad UX: asking me to speak for the privacy preferences of all my Facebook friends in one go is ludicrous, and more-or-less asking to be lied to.

It's like 20-page T&Cs, only worse. We all know that approximately nobody actually reads the T&Cs. But we can be damn sure that absolutely nobody will actually go and ask all their device contacts whether they're happy to have their details uploaded to Facebook.

How is any of this Facebooks problem let alone responsibility to sort out for you?

Well, for one thing, keeping personal data on people without their consent is probably illegal under most European nations' law, no matter how many of their friends tell you it's OK.

This is my basic problem with Facebook's whole MO: it tries to solve the one problem no single data mining company can ever solve -- having enough resources to spy effectively on everyone -- by recruiting people's own friends to do much of the spying for it. There is something fundamentally shady about that, if you believe privacy and control of sensitive personal data have any value.

Like mentioned before...you have to opt in to typing your phone number on your Facebook page, and it is visible to the people you've shared your Info page with, it doesn't get there by itself. More crying about nothing to make Facebook look evil?

Like mentioned before, these numbers have been imported from my phone on behalf of other people. I can assure you that my wife doesn't have her phone number in her facebook profile, yet there it is in the list. Likewise, I doubt my accountant has her PAs number on her profile yet there it is along side her FB profile along with an "add friend" link.

Like mentioned before, I'd be surprised that just because I accepted the T&Cs in app that this would be permissible under EU laws if the other party hadn't consented to FB retaining their number.

There are hundreds of people in my phone which are not listed from the link in the post, I only see people on my friends list who have their Facebook phone numbers shared there currently, or did at one time when it was imported into my phone book. Sounds more likely at one time your wife had her phone number pushed to / listed on Facebook and it was synced to your phone before she removed it.

I acknowledge that. I remember that the facebook-app on my android phone asked me whether I wanted to sync my phones addressbook to FB or not. I've chosen not to, and thus there are no phone-numbers FROM MY PHONE shown on the linked facebook-page, only the numbers my friends have put in themselves (some aren't even in my phone...).

I'm pretty sure I said no when that happened, and I can't find a setting anywhere, yet that page definitely has numbers that weren't put on Facebook by the owner. I wonder if the HTC Facebook integration (I have a Droid Incredible, and I knew that there was phonebook integration in the other direction--friends show up in my phonebook if their number is on facebook even if I've never directly added them). It's possible that they either automatically did the sync or asked in a not very clear way when I first set up my phone and was dying to click through all the prompts so I could use it.

I don't own a smartphone and therefore have never installed the facebook app yet I can see my list of contacts with their mobile phone numbers. My guess is that this page just lists your contacts that are sharing their mobile phone numbers with you and it has nothing to do with using the mobile Facebook app.

It's both. If you have contacts on a phone that aren't your Facebook friends, they'll be merged.

It'd be better if the warning said "sent and stored". Reading the Privacy Policy didn't give me fair warning that this info would be retained in this specific instance.