I'm assuming they actually delete the info when I tell them to delete it. But in any case my friends won't have access to that info therefore it's not their right to export that info to others unless I give them permission to (which I won't).

Last I checked, fb does not delete your data when you deactivate your account, they just hide it all. Moreover if you want it all gone, you have to go to all of your friends' pages and manually remove each piece of content you've contributed.

That's only if you deactivate your account. There's also a way to delete your account, and then your content will be deleted. However, they will still maintain the social graph (so if you'll create a new account with the same email, they know who you were connected too).

So you are saying that it's ok to export email addresses from gmail but not email addresses from facebook? Can you explain?

Because Gmail contacts list is a list >> I << compiled and maintain. If my friends deleted their gmail email accounts or yahoo or whatever I still have the list.

Contrast this to Facebook: I sign up on Facebook and friended a person based on their name, photo, and certain other details but not necessarily email. Does this mean I want them to be able to automatically pull my profile because they friended me based on my public info? Sure they can always compile their own non-Facebook database of info based on what they scrape manually but Facebook should not, and is not obligated to make it easy for people to grab their friends' data.

Good point. I'm convinced.

Not to speak for GP, but that is a perfectly reasonable position to take, and one that I would take. They're different services; GMail does not have third-party apps in the same sense. Facebook's app ecosystem has some quite disreputable parties in it; an API that lets these parties have access to friends' email addresses would place a lot of Facebook users' emails in the hands of companies that they have no direct relationship with or knowledge of.