Facebook launched its Japanese-language version today and vision-questing, globe-trotting CEO Mark Zuckerberg magically appeared in the land of the rising sun to take reporters' questions. Among the queries: What's the deal with Facebook dropping Google Friend Connect, the search engine's new service that sucks data out of rival social networks? Zuck explained:

Facebook has shut off access to Google's new Friend Connect, citing privacy issues, saying that the service "redistributes data" in ways that users don't "expect or understand," according to a blog post by Facebook developer Charlie Cheever. Google Friend Connect collected and displayed information available through Facebook's tools for third-party web developers to use on their own sites. Funny, Facebook hasn't had a problem with tracking users on third-party sites in the past, but then Facebook just launched a similarly named tool, Facebook Connect.