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Facebook Changed Everyone’s Email to @Facebook.com; Here’s How to Fix It
app103:
Sophos seems to agree with me about the spam, but I have given it a bit more thought and there is more than one Facebook feature to be exploited here and it will probably result in highly targeted spam, as I describe here: http://cranialsoup.blogspot.com/2012/06/facebook-offers-incredible-targeted.html
TaoPhoenix:
Just a heads-up, courtesy of Lifehacker:
-IainB (June 25, 2012, 09:05 PM)
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Drifting a little off topic, I like to go a little earlier in a news source, trying to get an earlier copy rather than an echo unless the echo copy has new info.
Lifehacker got it from Forbes, and Forbes got it from Gervase Markham.
http://blog.gerv.net/2012/06/facebook-email-mitm/
IainB:
Lifehacker got it from Forbes, and Forbes got it from Gervase Markham.
http://blog.gerv.net/2012/06/facebook-email-mitm/
-TaoPhoenix (June 27, 2012, 06:52 AM)
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Yes, both provide interesting links/discussions. Well worth a read.
justice:
From Gervase Markham's story:
The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.
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So this is why Facebook introduced it: They want you to go to their site to check for email. They don't want to send the messages to your email and have you interact there, they don't want you to use a search engine to find content, and they don't want you to use forums and instant messages to talk to people. They don't want you ever to get the idea to leave the site.
mouser:
Finally someone explained to me wtf this whole thing was actually about, thank you.
Since it's such a short explanation let's just recap it here:
I prefer email to social media. I do have a Facebook page, but I don’t post anything there, and I made sure that my primary personal email address, gerv[at]gerv.net, was displayed in the profile so that people could contact me directly.
Today, I happened to visit my Facebook profile, and noticed that they had changed the displayed email address to gerv.markham[at]facebook.com! The old one was still in the database, but it had been hidden. Email to the Facebook address is forwarded by Facebook to the other one, so it ends up in the same place. [Update: I now think this is not correct. The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there. Which is, IMO, even worse - they don't just pass it through their servers on the way to where it would have gone, they keep it, and fail to send me a copy!]
In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me...
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