Facebook changes everyone's listed emails to 'Facebook.com' | Hacker News Reader

Facebook changes everyone's listed emails to 'Facebook.com'

chicagotribune.com

117 pointskgermino37 comments

This is rather shocking. It's bad enough that Facebook periodically changes privacy settings, but this time they're changing the actual personal information listed in your profile. There's really only one reason I still have a Facebook account, and it's so old friends can find my current contact information if they need it. I really wish a viable competitor would appear and provide me an alternate option.

There is a competitor... The problem is, it's not enough to provide "you" the option. Many people have to agree to accept it together...

There is no viable competitor. Google+ is such a clusterfuck, especially with how they handled Google Apps emails.

What's the problem with Google Apps emails?

For a long time you simply couldn't sign up for Google+ with a Google Apps email. This means that now I have a Google+ account attached to a rarely-used gmail address I had lying around, instead of my primary email address that anyone who knows me would use to try to find me. And if I want to create a Google+ account with my primary email, that will leave me with two distinct Google+ accounts and with no way to migrate all my contacts from my first account over to the second.

Oh, and because Google couldn't resist making it even worse, some Google properties supported Google Apps emails and some didn't, which meant I actually had 3 Google accounts, two of which used the same email. When Google "fixed" that, they forced me to rename one of those accounts, except their data migrator tool is completely broken. So now I have 3 Google accounts, one of which is a throwaway gmail account that contains most of my data but on an email address I never use, one is my primary email which is a Google Apps account and contains almost no data, and the third is a garbage mangled form of my Google Apps email (it's myemail+google@mydomain) which contains all the data that used to be on my Google Apps email but which turned out to be associated with the shadow non-Google-Apps account instead.

It's a clusterfuck and I have no idea what to do about it.

I have a friend who has a very similar story to yours.

It's a clusterfuck and I have no idea what to do about it.

Have you tried submitting feedback using the gear icon?

According to this: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/10/google-is-now-a..., they're working on a migration tool which will let you transparently move from your gmail account to your domain account. Google Voice has a tool and it worked fine (along with the general data export tool for moving my contacts).

I understand your sentiment, but at least the @facebook email address sends incoming messages to your Facebook notification center. The switch shouldn't have been automatic, but it is a fairly slick and useful feature.

If by "useful feature" you mean "absolute abomination". If someone tries to send me an email and it goes to my notification center, I will never see it. That completely destroys the entire point of me listing my email on my profile.

Again, you're just talking about the automatic switch, which I also think is an abomination. I was talking about the @facebook email feature itself, which for someone who uses facebook (unlike yourself) is a reasonable feature.

"at least" means that, even though the automatic switch was a bad idea, "at least" it's still doing something useful.

Except its not. It's actively counterproductive. Anyone who tries to send to that address will incorrectly believe I will see their message, and yet I never will. For people like you it may be useful, but for people like me it is an anti-feature. That address should never have been made visible on my profile without my express permission.

Again, the only problem here is that they automatically switched the email address on your profile. If it was opt-in, then people who actually use facebook and want the feature (not you, clearly) can use it.

However, that would not achieve FB's apparent business objective of "pushing" people to adopt its messaging facility for extranet mail.

Even if they didn't automatically hide my old email address, merely making the @facebook.com one visible on my profile is an anti-feature. So no, the problem isn't that they automatically switched my visible email address, it's that they enabled a "feature" for me at all that turns out to be an anti-feature. Removing my real email from my profile was just the icing on that shit sandwich.

It's ludicrous to call that an "anti-feature." The feature may very well have been active on your account for years without you even knowing. Yet again, the only bad thing is their choice to replace your personal email address with their own.

It's unnecessary. Why would someone email my Facebook instead of emailing me? If they want to send a Facebook message, there's this nifty button called 'Message' for that very purpose. Facebook is Microsoft circa 2003.

Facebook has a billion users, and it's not at all inconceivable that this feature would be useful to a large quantity of them. I suspect that many users, especially younger ones, are more connected and engaged with their Facebook account that with their email. Certainly many Facebook users send far more Facebook messages than emails. Facebook is similar to Microsoft circa 2003 in the sense that a single tech-savvy individual is not their sole concern in product design.

I just went into my "Other" messages on Facebook and found a bunch of rubbish I was never notified of.

It's spam prevention. Since you can't actually receive email from an external source without screwing around with privacy settings, most mail will just bounce. Since there's no IMAP or even POP suport, the mail that does get through will be left unread.

this is about spam protection like integrating IE into Windows was about making the install easier. Seriously, this is about getting marketshare for a failing product.

I don't think it's very effective spam prevention. gmail.com and yahoo.com alone account for a large percentage of email addresses. Just add a few more to the list of domains to try, and there is a high probability you'll get something through.

jfoutz appears to be joking.

It's spam prevention... from all of my friends who are the only people who should be able to see my email on facebook? What sort of signal is facebook sending about their service then?

This is a major breach of trust.

This is a major breach of trust that no one has any right to be surprised by.

Seriously, why is everyone so surprised every time this happens? Are we collectively saying "There's no way they'll every make everyone agree to <insert breach here>"?

Because most people fail to learn from the past.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/03/07/234204/facebook-foun...

For users of facebook, it's been one breach of trust after another.

it would be if anyone still trusted facebook. seriously, i don't think even the most fanboyish teenagers trust facebook; they just use it because it's useful and all their friends are there.

Facebook has notifications for almost anything that happens on their site which might be interesting for me to know about.

Why on earth do they not notify me about emails to my @facebook.com address?

It seems that Facebook as a company has an OCD to keep changing shit. If not interfaces then API methods.

Mine didn't get changed?

Perhaps this is just for people without an email?

I had a hidden email. They added an unhidden facebook.com email address for me. I've just gone and hid it.

Your facebook.com email address was exposed with the same permissions as your profile. My personal email is still visible to my friends only, and my facebook.com address is exposed to only me when I check just now.

Also anyone who can see your profile knows your facebook.com address already, as it is the same as the URL to your profile.

Yes, exactly. That's why its so stupid for them to hide my other email addresses from my friends. I listed them specifically because they are alternate means of contacting me.

My personal email addresses were exposed to my friends, but when this change occurred they were hidden on my profile and only the facebook.com address was shown.

Your hiding it doesn't help though... your Facebook email address is <<username>>@facebook.com

I don't see anyway to keep that secret.

It may not be secret, but if you choose to have the @facebook.com email address listed on your profile, it suggests that the @facebook.com email address is an appropriate email address to contact you at. I hid it from my contact information because facebook is not the best way to contact me and I don't want anyone to assume that it is because someone at facebook decided to see how many people don't do anything.

This is NOT shocking enough to be posted every fucking time you see a newspaper write about it.

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