In this case the problem can be solved with 2 edges :) I am your friend and your are mine. Keep an edge on each side. Heck I could be your friend you may not chose to be my friend and that is fine. This gets even more fun as now both parties have to consent to only share "their" friend status with FB. Americans are forced to share their friendships, Europeans are not. Again total value for users no?
Now is this technically optimised (for the company) - no and irrelevant (IMO) in the context of how much control/power a user has. You could extend this to messages too. What messages I sent, what messages I received. I didnt send it - I dont own it. What about shared documents you say? Here users are explicitly sharing with other users for collaboration (the contents of said documents totally are of no business to the company).
See providers are providing a service(?). If the services needs to harvest data I still question who is benefiting from that harvesting? If the user is not actually seeing value (apart from subsidizing the cost of the internet) are we then not just using technical/UX complexities to justify a low-value (to the user) solution?
Now is this technically optimised (for the company) - no and irrelevant (IMO) in the context of how much control/power a user has. You could extend this to messages too. What messages I sent, what messages I received. I didnt send it - I dont own it. What about shared documents you say? Here users are explicitly sharing with other users for collaboration (the contents of said documents totally are of no business to the company).
See providers are providing a service(?). If the services needs to harvest data I still question who is benefiting from that harvesting? If the user is not actually seeing value (apart from subsidizing the cost of the internet) are we then not just using technical/UX complexities to justify a low-value (to the user) solution?