Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Says Your Email Is @Facebook
beaverdownunder writes "Facebook has been silently changing users' default e-mail addresses to their @facebook.com address in a move that Facebook claims was 'to protect users' and to create 'consistency,' but has been blasted by many bloggers and news outlets as 'Facebook's Lame Attempt To Force Its E-Mail Service On You,' and even characterised the move as a Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack on users' private correspondence. From the article: 'Many articles characterized the change as a ham-fisted way for Facebook to push its email system, which it first announced in late 2010. At that time the company said its goal was to integrate conversations across multiple channels of communication — text messages, Facebook chat, email, etc. Facebook seemed surprised by the reaction. 'We basically defaulted to show your Facebook address as we rolled this out, just to keep it consistent for everyone,' said Meredith Chin, Facebook's manager of product communications. 'I'm seeing this whole meme around the idea that it's us pushing for people only to use facebook.com addresses,' Chin said. "That was not our intention. We want people to use whatever's easier for them.''"
Just went into my profile to try to remove / disable this POS and you are not even given the option to do so...
I am so close to closing my Facebook account it is not even funny anymore.
"That was not our intention. We want people to use whatever's easier for them.''
Whatever's easier for them is to use the e-mail address that they set up as their default before Facebook screwed with their settings. Changing users' settings without their consent is a great way to lose users. I should know, I dumped my Hotmail account for that very reason.
Funny how people are always surprised by the reaction they get when they forget to consider others when making decisions
So we made @facebook easiest.
To some degree I understand it though. Facebook hacks/bots becoming more and more common place. For 99% of normal users, they don't just have friends as "friends" ... and every one of those potential hack victims can see your email address and potentially harvest it.
Facebook should be aware by now that users don't like Facebook (the system) forcing some changes onto them, or changing their preferences to something "that is good for you". (See privacy settings, Timeline)
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
"...a move that Facebook claims was 'to protect users' and to create 'consistency,' ... Yeah, right. Same shit, different day. I guess the amazing part is that they expect their lies to be believed.
"Your Facebook email is based on your public username. Email sent to this address goes to Facebook messages."
http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=224049364288051
So if I didn't want a public email address on my FB profile then why would I want one now?
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
My primary email is hidden, and a junk dump address anyway
If anyone sends mail to my @facebook address it be ignored ... I have no idea how to even look at this!
Facebook has posting, direct messages, and chat why would I want an email?
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
How long before FB is hated and flamed as much as MS and Apple on /.?
Probably not before it slips away into the obscure forgotten Internet shoe-box along with Myspace and Friendster.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
E-mail addresses are surprisingly long-lasting. There are still many vans on German roads
The local US equivalent of your German story is people still paying for AOL to keep their aol screenname / aol email address because they really like it, or its all over their stationary so it would be expensive to change, etc. I would guess your t-online.de is vaguely equivalent in concept to AOL?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And how many people threaten to quit are two entirely different things. Unfortunately many people won't even notice these changes let alone care
Now that I've been off Facebook for a long time, whenever I see friends we actually have something to talk about, because I have no clue as to what's been going on with them. It's brilliant!
Try it! :)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I hadn't noticed this but in the last week or so I've noticed the appearance of ads masquerading as 'likes'. I'm getting all sorts of shit in my newsfeed on a regular (i.e. daily basis.) FaceBitch is definitely going out of its way to piss off users. Thank goodness for Social Fixer.
Seriously A facebook email address says one thing about you , you use facebook. So when your boss see's it and sticks in a friend request how do you tactfully say never in a million years.
Personally, I would do it by declining the request. It isn't hard. If that isn't option because he's a scumbag, accept and add him to a group with the same privileges as non-friends.
"If you see a man on a horse, he is likely an enemy. Kill the man and eat the horse."
I just checked my own Facebook info page and discovered that while my gmail address was still "Friends/not shown on timeline," my new Facebook address is "Friends/shown on timeline." Depending on exactly is meant by that last bit, it could explain why I'm suddenly getting about double the spam in my Gmail account that I was getting a month ago. (I get email notifications from Facebook sent to me Gmail account, as I suspect most people do.) Thank goodness for good spam filters...
There's a good reason why I ratchet-down my email address' availability on web pages, and apparently Facebook isn't nearly so concerned (which, of course, comes as no great surprise). I'd be curious to know if someone whose normal address is set to "hidden" now has a non-hidden Facebook address.
Also, the line, "We want people to use whatever's easier for them" has a somewhat different meaning when you're actively making it easier for those looking at a user's info page to see the @facebook address, rather than the one the user intentionally put there. Either the staff is oblivious, or they're being dishonest about their intentions. (Not sure, given their track record with privacy and such...)
A better way to have handled this would be to send an email to everyone on the site and remind, or in some cases inform, them they have a @facebook.com email address that they can use and display on the site, with a way to display this if they so wish.
Facebook has shown, however, that they have no respect for basic privacy. There are many people that should never have a way to contact us. I wonder how long this will last now that sexual predators will have a way to contact children using this email address without even having to show up on their friends list first.
they are essentially reverting the internet back to what it was in the mid-90's.
"That was not our intention. We want people to use whatever's easier for them.'' -- BULLSHIT! They want to control and read as many people's e-mails as possible so they can show them relevant ads and make money. More people, more money, the end. What exactly do they think such an unbelievable lie will accomplish? Ironic, considering Mark Z is all about openness.
I suspect this is less about trying to get everyone using Facebook for their email and more about usurping any third party apps that will automatically sync with Facebook contacts (iOS 6 anyone?). All you're going to get now is a load of garbage contacts.
The entire purpose around user settings is to allow users to display what they want and to see what they want. So that means DON'T FUCK WITH MY SETTINGS. That means with every update don't check boxes that I didn't have checked before, don't force me to accept a change that gives me no way to say "No Thank You"
And the fact that Facebook was not prepared for the reaction it received is a bold-faced lie. If they didn't expect this reaction, it would not have be implemented so quietly. Facebook knew there would be controversy, again, thus the hush-hush.
On the other hand, Facebook is free to use, so it is in Facebook's interest to change the email address extension. If you were paying for your Facebook account do you really think there would be as many people on the site? Nope. So sadly, you're getting what your pay for, no fees, no freedom no privacy.
If you don't like the TOS, leave Facebook.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Facebook has put me face-to-face with the fact that my online "friends" all suck. Almost all of my network turns out to be people I knew in high school and haven't talked to in 20 years, half of them are religious or political nuts, and none of them are really my "friends". My real friends don't use Facebook.
Facebook is a fad. It's going to be a very long-lived fad, which is fine. But it's hard to see them as anything other than a clearinghouse for data that isn't worth distributing any other way. I do not care about what happened to you today in MobWars.
'I'm seeing this whole meme around the idea that it's us pushing for people only to use facebook.com addresses,' Chin said, 'That was not our intention.'
Ahem;
Bullshit.
That is all.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Cool. Another domain to add to my "do not even open it just auto delete it" spam box.
Interesting. Company beginning to fall apart, offer IPO, take money, screw with customers to speed up it's demise, run.
What a train wreck.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Look up their page on Google? Seriously, everyone who is interested in your feedback has an email address. If they are only asking you for "Likes" and feedback on their Facebook profile page, and follow them on Twitter, they are asking you to be a co-marketer for them and nothing else.
I don't know why your wrapped around the axle about not having a FB page for communication if you should need it. You're here on slashdot which, in the words of John Bender, is "sorta social, demented and sad, but social." Go make a profile with your throwaway gmail address (I used the one I use for /. and other online forums), use John Rossdee as your name, and pick a celebrity picture off of Google Images for your profile pic. Done. Now you can reply to all those pages you seem desperate to become part of.
I've had people find the real me off my forum handle, but it's rare and requires actual, targeted effort. It's not that hard, though I think it's only happened twice in over a decade.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I know of absolutely no one that uses facebook mail, and probably the vast majority have no idea it even exists. So anything that uses my or anybody else's facebook mail account is obviously a spammer who screen scraped it from my account. In a perverse way, this is a Good Thing because it attracts spammers and absolutely nobody else. It could actually be interesting to find out how quickly your facebook honey pot fills up which shows how much bad guys are paying attention to your facebook account.
I didn't have any email addresses under my "About". Facebook didn't change my email addresses, it added the @facebook.com one to my About page. I was able to hide it, but you won't be able to get rid of it.
You can easily spoof FB messages to people using an unsecured SMTP server. I tried sending myself a message from my wife (not knowing my wife's FB or email passwords), and it worked; it looked as though the message were from her! Since there's no email headers to evaluate, you can't tell where it really came from. There is a little icon indicating that it is "Unable to confirm X as the sender." But it still shows up with her FB profile picture and full name (which I didn't provide in the email).
I know that was "only a movie" and "facts were changed" make it more dramatic, but why do I get the sinking feeling that between the constant changes to privacy settings, the shady, over-valued IPO that the basic leitmotif of the movie -- that Zuckerberg is a morally deficient opportunist -- is the basic leitmotif of the entire operation?
There seems to be nothing about Facebook and the way it is run that is honest or straightforward. I read the article on the NY Times this morning and the naked, unapologetic dishonesty on display was fairly breathtaking although totally and completely expected.
I can't say I will stop using the site, but I've always been reluctant to put much "serious" information in my profile. Most of it is silly (Religion: "I believe I'll have another") and I regularly check my privacy settings to see what has been unset.
Although lately it seems that people use it less for even meaningful textual communication -- it's just reposting dumb jpeg humor and I find myself using it less and less. More changes like this and I might just decide to jettison it completely.
Facebook can't change my email. They can't take over my DNS and reroute my mx records. All they can do is set up some address and collect junk on their servers.I don't even care what people looking at facebook think my email is. Honestly, i'd guess that 99.9% of the time if someone is using facebook to contact me, it's not going to be through email. As far as i'm concerned, this seems like a nice feature. keep facebook messaging routed to this honey pot they've set up on my behalf. Maybe they can set up a phone number for me too.
I noticed this the other day. I sync my phone with facebook for many of my contacts. Now I have an address book full of bogus email addresses where they were correct before.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So sayeth the Slashdot demographic as they stand in the cold and stare hungrily at the "cool kids" through the window.
But it's bullshit. Facebook stopped being about cool years ago, and it continues to pull huge traffic and hold onto enormous numbers of users. Why? Because it's not about being cool - it's about being useful, and they've pretty much mastered that.
Now every time they turn email notifications back on that I don't want, it won't go to one of the email addresses I ever check... (It was already linked to my 'spam attractor' email that I only check once a week.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Yes, just like whenever people see my GMail address I get tons of requests for Google+.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
If they meant easier for them to snoop in your mails and make money of the contents. Their IPO put great pressure on the company to find new revenue streams, so they're exploring every nook and cranny to fleece their userbase for extra content to sell to corporations.
While I'm a user of the site, this brazen disregard for a user's preferences was a big red flag for me. They didn't even bother to ask! I know a user has no rights on Facebook, but at least they pretended not to predate their users outright. This action crossed that line. It's not your profile, it's Facebook's permanent register of your persona.
Perhaps it's time to seek greener pastures, the posts are mostly vapid nonsense and Reddit/9gag regurgitations anyway.