Facebook Changed Everyone's Email to Facebook.com; Here's How to Fix It
lifehacker.com
lifehacker.com
All my friends have emails, and most of them have Facebook, but not all of them check Facebook that often or only have Facebook to not become a social outcast. You either need to contact them by phone or by email if you need something from them in some immediate time frame. Add to that the fact that there are more emails listed on the site than phone numbers so your primary option is email them.
So now those people who haven't bothered checking Facebook cannot be contacted because that email address just routes back to Facebook. It negates the whole point of having your email listed, which is for your friends to contact you in some non-Facebook way.
And Facebook just has a fetish with mucking with your personal settings. It's the only company that routinely does this kind of thing without bothering to say anything about it.
People keep talking like some magical Facebook competitor is just around the corner, ready to take on 400+ million fleeing users and assume its position at the top.
It simply isn't going to happen. The ghost town that is Google Plus is showing exactly what most competitors end up looking like.
The groups of people you communicate with are different. Just like during the 90s, some groups used AIM, some MSN, some ICQ...
Would you be surprised if news broke that Facebook has been selling your private messages to third parties? Not really. What if Google did that? That would cause uproar, so G+ is competitive in terms of user control.
Is there a tradeoff between user control and social connections that users face when using Facebook? Were this the case, G+ would have much higher market share and users would have already started flooding away, with the network effect in play.
But that's not the case. Control is relatively negligible to the majority of Facebook users. Competitors won't succeed until values change.
Personally, I value control. I'd be done with Facebook were it not for its White Pages functionality - with a name, you can find someone and contact them. That's not the case for the majority though, so having other competitive systems won't do much good.
This even affected profiles that listed 2 or more email addresses.
This seems painfully obvious to me. I am willing to assume that this change in visibility of email addresses was inadvertent or just a simple misthought choice, but it seems far more arrogant of Facebook to think that I'm going to use them as an email client. Ever. Besides the privacy implications, Facebooks messages feature and email, basically be definition and by 5+ years of usage, indicates that they're not the same thing.
This is the worst possible way I've seen someone use email, and I'm someone who will often use Facebook messages as it's a more reliable way of getting in touch with someone than email.
Also, this change just generally makes it harder to make use of other social sites. Need the person's e-mail address to add them on LinkedIn? Need to scrape e-mail addresses of your friends to invite them to another service (as was talked about a lot a few years ago)? Can't do either in many cases if your friends just show their @facebook addresses.
Edit: Well, for LinkedIn that would only work if the person associated their facebook.com address with LinkedIn, which I don't think people do. For the latter, it could still work but the person would strangely hear about the other service via Facebook (which I suppose Facebook could 'lose' those messages if it became a problem) and it could be hard to look people up by their more common e-mail addresses.
At least I've found out about it now and have been able to remove the address from my profile.
Really big inconvenience.
They also only made the change for email addresses -- not IM usernames, etc. If the two layers were to help with privacy somehow, why not apply it to everything?
Recent events in the UK make me have less confidence in the law abiding nature of large lawyered corporations. This is especially true with respect to privacy which is complex, often not in the corporation's interest, and poorly regulated.
I'll agree I sound a bit like a paranoid privacy nut here, and that there's nothing to suggest Facebook are doing anything illegal.
Is there anything that is more a threat to Facebook than misinformation? I am sure they track IP and where you are hitting the local switches and routers, on top of the location you provide, but is it time to provide false location and demographic info to spread a marketing virus. What would make advertisers shy off more than discovering that the demographic info is trash and even more useless than the trash Facebook now hocks.