DonationCoder.com Forum
Main Area and Open Discussion => Living Room => Topic started by: IainB on June 25, 2012, 09:05 PM
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Just a heads-up, courtesy of Lifehacker:
Facebook Changed Everyone’s Email to @Facebook.com; Here’s How to Fix It (http://lifehacker.com/5921095/facebook-just-changed-your-email-without-permission-heres-how-to-get-it-back)
Beats me why Facebook would behave like this.
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My email address has been visible to Only Me since I've had a Facebook account, and that hasn't changed. This new dummy email address is visible to Friends. I wonder which one Facebook apps have access to -- could this be a spam prevention measure?
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If their idea of spam prevention is silently adding an e-mail address that is visible to more people than your own address, then they are almost as bad as facebook ... oh wait ;D
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I made my email addresses private - "Only me" and "Hidden from timeline".
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Beats me why Facebook would behave like this.
-IainB
Now FB can claim that its email service is a great success. Proof? Hundreds of millions of users. ;) :D
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It doesn't matter if you hide the email address, it still exists. And if you have one of those custom facebook URL's, it is easy to guess the email address. It's the name in your URL @facebook.com.
Before the email address was optional, now it is not. You have it whether you want it or not, plan to use it or not, hide it or not. And you don't get to choose one that is different than the name you already use for facbook's custom URL.
And it will be so easy for the spammers to figure it out, even if you remove it from your profile.
If you have ever made a comment on a company's fan page, ever liked something popular, friended anyone else that has, they will easily find you to spam you.
Just imagine the notifications for every spam message, mixed in with the ones for private messages from friends and family.
This is going to be a disaster for Facebook with a lot of people closing their accounts and going elsewhere. Just a matter of time, now.
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too cynical? "Yes we respect your privacy settings and for your convenience here is a overarching layer to bypass it."
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I would imagine it is more of a way to get tons of e-mail from the less tech-savvy users routed through their service, so they can gather up even more information about them.
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This is going to be a disaster for Facebook with a lot of people closing their accounts and going elsewhere. Just a matter of time, now.
-app103
Yes, you could well be proven right.
This sort of apparently ad hoc unilateral controlling action wouldn't bode well for anyone, I reckon.
Given their past performance, how could you take anything but a dim view of this?
It would seem to be pretty desperate to risk shooting yourself in the foot like this.
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They're just trying to cull out the last of the few people there left with an ounce of common sense so the rest can be quietly volunteeded (via EULA update) to participate in testing of their new Soylent Green line of products.
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Not that I care about facebook, but everyone seems to be talking about this change of emails and I still don't get what it means.. What does it mean they they changed your email to @facebook? I guess I just don't know how the emails are used.. What are the ramifications of that? How does it affect you? Can someone explain how these emails are used and what it matters what email facebook shows(?) uses(?)
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Not that I care about facebook, but everyone seems to be talking about this change of emails and I still don't get what it means.. What does it mean they they changed your email to @facebook? I guess I just don't know how the emails are used.. What are the ramifications of that? How does it affect you? Can someone explain how these emails are used and what it matters what email facebook shows(?) uses(?)-mouser
Dunno about that but when I had tried to send an email from my company address to [email protected], after few hours I've got server reply saying something like:
Your message was not delivered due to user's account privacy settings.
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Do you have to check it? I mean the e-mail account. As long as they don't forward to my personal account, I don't care. It will just take up space on their servers. :)
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This is really nothing in my opinion, no effect on anybody as far as I can tell. It's probably another step in their messaging system - ie facebook want everything to be facebook, even the part after @
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This is really nothing in my opinion, no effect on anybody as far as I can tell. It's probably another step in their messaging system - ie facebook want everything to be facebook, even the part after @
-rgdot
Well, I believe it can be something to certain people. If you actually publish your e-mail address and use it as a form of contact, then this does affect you. Especially if it's a business or your primary link to family/friends.
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At least in my case I can toggle visibility of @facebook and my email
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
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after few hours I've got server reply saying something like:
Your message was not delivered due to user's account privacy settings.
-fenixproductions
Curiosity: do your privacy settings allow people who are not your friends to send you personal messages in facebook? I suspect not :)
From what I understand, this is just them giving the messaging system a broader use, by fully replacing it with something similar to email. As Jibz said, just an attempt to get more data (instead of giving it to google? :P ):
I would imagine it is more of a way to get tons of e-mail from the less tech-savvy users routed through their service, so they can gather up even more information about them.
-Jibz
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At least in my case I can toggle visibility of @facebook and my email
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=31436.msg291985#msg291985))
-rgdot
I don't think the largest issue is the ability to toggle visibility, but that facebook decided without consent to make it visible by default.
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I don't disagree, just pointing it out. Visible by default, no matter what it is, is modus operandi @ facebook and everybody should treat it that way too. Without external (politicians, users and even G+) pressure 99.9% the current privacy settings wouldn't even exist.
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after few hours I've got server reply saying something like:
Your message was not delivered due to user's account privacy settings.
-fenixproductions
Curiosity: do your privacy settings allow people who are not your friends to send you personal messages in facebook? I suspect not :)
-jgpaiva
You're right.
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Seems there's at least 162 people with my name so I dont think this new email address will be a problem. Also they've left my original address as my main email, so I presume that is what apps will get (unfortunately).
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They should have changed all to @zuckerberg.com
:P
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At least in my case I can toggle visibility of @facebook and my email
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=31436.msg291985#msg291985))
-rgdot
I don't think the largest issue is the ability to toggle visibility, but that facebook decided without consent to make it visible by default.-wraith808
I still haven't understood why this is a problem. If you allowed messages from unknown people, the "send a message" button was there before and it accomplished the same objective. If you did not allow them (and still don't), as fenixproductions mentioned, emails from unknown sources get refused (much in the same way messages from unknown sources would).
If they made the personal emails available (the ones not from facebook), I would understand the problem, this way, I really don't.
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At least in my case I can toggle visibility of @facebook and my email
(see attachment in previous post (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=31436.msg291985#msg291985))
-rgdot
I don't think the largest issue is the ability to toggle visibility, but that facebook decided without consent to make it visible by default.-wraith808
I still haven't understood why this is a problem. If you allowed messages from unknown people, the "send a message" button was there before and it accomplished the same objective. If you did not allow them (and still don't), as fenixproductions mentioned, emails from unknown sources get refused (much in the same way messages from unknown sources would).
If they made the personal emails available (the ones not from facebook), I would understand the problem, this way, I really don't.
-jgpaiva
You're looking at it purely from the intent of privacy concerns and personal uses. Facebook, for better or worse, is used by non-businesses. And some of them post their contact information to get in contact with them off of facebook. If all of a sudden, business correspondence is going to facebook messaging rather than their e-mail address... that's a concern, at least as far as I see.
The other concern (even from a personal use) is transparency of action. When google opted people in to buzz, did it really do anything terribly bad? It was just that people got opted into a service that they didn't opt into. Same thing goes here.
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They're just trying to cull out the last of the few people there left with an ounce of common sense so the rest can be quietly volunteeded (via EULA update) to participate in testing of their new Soylent Green line of products.
-Stoic Joker
Har-de-har-har. Very droll.
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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
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Just a heads-up, courtesy of Lifehacker:
-IainB
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/
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Lifehacker got it from Forbes, and Forbes got it from Gervase Markham.
http://blog.gerv.net/2012/06/facebook-email-mitm/
-TaoPhoenix
Yes, both provide interesting links/discussions. Well worth a read.
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From Gervase Markham's story (http://The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.):
The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.
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.
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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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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:
...
-mouser
I could be wrong, of course, but I'm not so sure it's that simple.
For example: Changing your email address on Facebook isn’t going to help: why you’re screwed anyway (http://papertreiger.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/changing-your-email-on-facebook-isnt-going-to-help-why-youre-screwed-anyway/)
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From Gervase Markham's story (http://The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.):
The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.
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.
-justice
Yup... that's what I meant/said earlier.
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From Gervase Markham's story (http://The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.):
The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.
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.
-justice
Yup... that's what I meant/said earlier.
-wraith808
Indeed, so you did, and I suspected you were probably likely to be proven correct.
I reckon this could have all been a mistake or a miscalculated risk on Facebook's part.
The Law of Unintended Consequences, etc. - big potential for a backlash from those members who wake up to the implications/ramifications of what has been done. Somewhere in there, trust could get wiped out.
Even if this supposition turns out not to be true:
They don't want you ever to get the idea to leave the site.
- it must leave a lot of people wondering.
Fair do's to Google. At least when they introduced g+, though they seemed clearly to be aligning themselves as a Facebook competitor, they didn't make it (g+) compulsory - though they seemed to come pretty close to doing that.
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Fair do's to Google. At least when they introduced g+, though they seemed clearly to be aligning themselves as a Facebook competitor, they didn't make it (g+) compulsory - though they seemed to come pretty close to doing that.
-IainB
Oh, I imagine that's in large part because of Buzz. :)
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Was buzz "social networking"-related? I'm not sure
I tried using buzz - and wave for that matter - but still have no real idea what either was supposed to achieve.
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57464415-93/facebook-e-mail-mess-address-books-altered-e-mail-lost/
An alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail.
Facebook users say contacts' e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent -- and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57464415-93/facebook-e-mail-mess-address-books-altered-e-mail-lost/
An alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail.
Facebook users say contacts' e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent -- and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.
-Jibz
Oops. Maybe it's deliberate? Or maybe it is the effect of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
It is confusing though, because, well, it seems the Facebook email changes might be a good thing: Why Facebook Forcing Its Email On You Is Brilliant (http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/06/27/why-facebook-forcing-its-email-on-you-is-brilliant/)
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Well the subject of this discussion is Facebook Changed Everyone’s Email to @Facebook.com; Here’s How to Fix It, but it now seems as though, if you didn't apply the fix - or quickly enough - then you might have some irreversible problems.
For example: @facebook.com e-mail plague chokes phone address books (http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/07/facebook-com-e-mail-plague-chokes-phone-address-books/)
The splash damage from Facebook's forced addition of @facebook.com e-mail addresses to users' profiles has carried over to phone contacts. Users who have given Facebook permission to sync information from the site to their phone's contacts have noticed that since the great e-mail address donation, legitimate e-mail address entries have been replaced with Facebook ones (as reported by CNET). As a result, some messages have been going to unintended locations or have become hidden. And there's no easy way to revert the changes...(you can read the rest in the link above)
I'm not sure what the word is that could describe this sort of shambles.