Sync of facebook contacts with android doesn't work for single entries

Hi all,

I have stumbled upon a very curious problem. I own a smart phone with android 2.1. Under Settings->Accounts I have the option to add my facebook account. (Note, this has nothing to to with the facebook for android app.) After doing this, all my facebook accounts conveniently appear in my phone contacts and (in most cases) are automatically linked with my existing contacts. (Some contatcs have to be manually linked because of different names or spelling.) So far so good.

But 4 of my (round) 100 contacts don't get synced at all, meaning they don't appear at all in my contacts. As this only happens with few selected contacts I tend to believe that this is a problem with facebook, not android. Why should android select these 4 contacts unfit for synchronisation?

Are there some privacy settings which are so restrictive thet they forbid me to use my friend's contact information on my mobile, if he has activated them? I've already browsed through a lot of android forums (those only deal with the problem of no sync at all) and the facebook help center, but nothing brought me even closer to a solution.

Thanks for your help, Anja

P.S. I've posted this under the mobile topic, if you admins think, it better belongs to privacy, feel free to move it

Well, after a lot of playing around with a friend's account, I now know at least, what triggers this behaviour.

If a FB-contact has selected to turn off all platform apps, this happens:
- I can't add him to my contacts in android
- I can't send him any messages from my phone (or rather only if I already started a conversation with him)
- and I can't recieve any notifications if I get a message from him.

In my opinion this is a bug in FBs privacy settings. I think most people use this setting to prevent companies like Zynga from accessing one's data, not one's own FB contacts, just because they use a smartphone, not a notebook or else.