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Comment by jpeterson | Hacker News Reader

I think the difference here is that everything they've done before now has been more or less bounded by my own actions. If they screw my privacy, it's my own damned fault for posting sensitive stuff to their site. Hell, even if they track me around the web, I should've been more careful about blocking their cookies.

But this is another ballgame. What they've done here is effectively hijack a completely unrelated and ubiquitous communication channel — without any action on my part, and without giving any indication of doing so!

I don't even use Facebook, but since I created a Facebook account at some point in the past, they potentially have access to my inbound email traffic. That's just absurd and stupid.

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I've avoided installing any facebook mobile apps out of fear of specifically this kind of thing. I'm much more comfortable keeping it quarantined in a web browser, away from my real contacts list, even if that browser interface is comparatively sluggish and unusuable.

I don't mean to defend them because this move is stupid, but to help you get this back in control: you can go you your about page and set the @facebook email to be hidden. I had done this in the past and they didn't touch it.

No, that's the problem here: I had definitely hidden my @facebook email address (setting it to be visible to only me) when it was first created. After a number of people posted this story, I found that the email address was suddenly the only one showing. That's what is so nefarious about this. I had to go and reselect the options I had already chosen, and the only reason I noticed it was because of the press. Really slimy.

I, as well, have set the @facebook.com address as hidden and set my normal address as visible and public. After the story broke I found my usual address "hidden from timeline" and the @facebook.com address visible.

Does this fix any device synchronization problems, where someone you know had their record of your e-mail address changed to the @facebook one automatically?

It doesn't seem to be clear, as I write this, exactly what is going on there and how much is completely automatic/without consent vs. how much was "expected" behaviour. It's pretty clear that a lot of people aren't happy about it regardless, though. Even if some contact originally got onto your phone via integration with a third party service, that could have been years ago. If you weren't aware that the contact was only remaining there/unmodified because the third party chose to leave it that way, it's understandable that you might be upset if that changed without warning after a long time.

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