Facebook changed your email address

81

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/la-f ... 2947.story

Without asking for permission, Facebook has changed users' listed email address to one ending in "@facebook.com."

The changed was discovered Saturday, and has resulted in either users having their @facebook.com address being listed or simply having all of their other addresses be hidden, as happened in my case.

The @facebook.com email service was announced in 2010, but it hasn't really gained traction as a replacement to other email service. It makes sense for the social network to want to promote its own service, but the way it's gone about it is sure to upset some people.

To change back your email address, go to your profile, click "Update info," scroll down to "Contact Info" and click "Edit." Select with whom you want to share each individual email address and to the right of that choose whether you want your email displayed on your timeline or not.

While users can opt out of having their @facebook.com address listed, the troubling part of the change is how Facebook went about implementing it. The social network didn't as much as announce the change was coming or alert users once it happened.

Instead, a blogger came across the change over the weekend while checking his profile's contact information.

"Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me," said Gervase Markham, the blogger. "In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?"

The company contends it announced the change back in April in a note mentioning all users would be getting updated URL and email addresses. However, it makes no mention of the fact that users' listed emails would be changed.

"In addition to everyone receiving an address, we’re also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their timelines," a spokesman for the company said. "Ever since the launch of timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own timelines, and today we’re extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address."

Mamasan23

:fp:

rick1zoo2

puck pacebook

DS1119

Meh. Who gives a fuck anyway. If you think your info is safe online anywhere your living in a bubble. With enough money/connections anyone can find out anything they want about you.

FrankieG

Even if you don't list an @facbook.com email address, it's easy to figure out. Go to your profile, and whatever the end of your url is, is what your address would be. Just need to add <!-- e --><a href="mailto:'@facebook.com">'@facebook.com</a><!-- e -->" to the url ending.. I tried it from my yahoo account and the email ends up in your messages.

Nami

Evilbook...

Dru_Cortez

DS1119 wrote:

Meh. Who gives a fuck anyway. If you think your info is safe online anywhere your living in a bubble. With enough money/connections anyone can find out anything they want about you.

In the name of all that is holy,
would you tell that to my gf's
14 year-old daughter?
1 more "glamour photo"
+ I am going to lose it!
Cheers.

chadwick

if facebook changed my email address on me i think i'd get mad as fuck, contact them and lose them altogether from my online affairs

rick1zoo2

Facebook quietly unveils 'stalking app' By John D. Sutter, CNN
updated 2:40 PM EDT, Mon June 25, 2012 | Filed under: Social Media

A new Facebook app could open users to serendipitous, or awkward, interactions with people who know you're nearby.STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Facebook has quietly launched a mobile feature called "Find Friends Nearby"
The feature uses phones' GPS to show which of your friends are near your location
Blog ReadWriteWeb already has dubbed the feature a "stalking app"
It appears Facebook users must opt in to the feature, which may allay privacy concerns
(CNN) -- Facebook appears to have quietly unveiled a new feature designed to let people see which Facebook users are nearby at any given time.

The company calls the feature "Find Friends Nearby," and on Monday it was available through Facebook's mobile apps and website despite the fact that it hasn't been formally announced. The blog ReadWriteWeb already has dubbed the feature a "stalking app" because it could open people up to potentially awkward or threatening interactions with strangers on the social network who know you're nearby.

To test out the feature, go to fb.com/ffn in a browser, or follow this path in the Facebook's mobile apps: menu > apps > find friends > other tools > Find Friends Nearby.

It appears that Facebook users must opt in to the feature by going to that site, otherwise their profiles will not appear in a list of people who are nearby.

The blog TechCrunch first reported on the feature Sunday after a non-Facebook developer tipped off the site to the feature's existence. In a comment on that site's post about the new feature, Facebook developer Ryan Patterson, who says he developed Find Friends Nearby, described how he hopes the app will be used:

"For me, the ideal use case for this product is the one where when you're out with a group of people whom you've recently met and want to stay in contact with. Facebook search might be effective, or sharing your vanity addresses or business cards, but this tool provides a really easy way to exchange contact information with multiple people with minimal friction."

A Facebook spokeswoman declined to provide additional information.

"We are constantly testing new features but have nothing more to share at this time," she wrote in an e-mail to CNN.

Reactions to the news were mixed in the tech blogosphere.

The site Gizmodo finds the new feature to be potentially useful -- and dangerous.

"You meet a cute somebody at a concert, you're like, 'Hey, we should be Facebook friends,' and they're like 'OMG, totes!' Then rather than having to spell your names and search around, you've got a much smaller group of people to choose from. I guess that's great, right?" Brent Rose writes on that tech news site.

But Rose adds: "Sure, it'd be great to easily add a contact quicker, but imagine this: some creeper has been molesting you with his/her eyes all night. She opens the app, can kinda recognize your face from your profile picture, and now said creeper knows (your) name and possibly some of your personal info."

That would be the downside.

Others say the app simply isn't ready for prime time.

The blog Engadget calls the app "fairly primitive," and The Next Web says it amounts to "nothing more than a parlor trick at this point" since other location-based friend finders haven't caught on with the general public despite their buzziness in tech circles.

Facebook recently acquired a company called Glancee, which did something similar to the Find Friends Nearby feature. So there's speculation that the company's technology may have contributed to the new Facebook feature. Patterson, however, the Facebook developer, wrote on TechCrunch's post that he created the feature during a hackathon.

Other similar mobile "social discovery" apps include Highlight, Banjo and Sonar. Some of these apps will also show you nearby friends of friends or even strangers who share your interests, based on your social-network profile.

It's unclear exactly how much information the Find Friends Nearby feature gives away. For now at least, users have to log into that site intentionally to see a list of people who are nearby, and that list of people appears to be quite limited for now.

Also to be determined is how large of a radius the feature employs. Does it search for people who are within eyeshot of you? Or within a mile?

If you test the feature, let us know what you think in the comments section. So far, we haven't been able to interact with anyone -- friendly or otherwise -- who's nearby.



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mickeyrat

what I can see on mine is they issued me a new email addy based off my user name. They didnt replace my email addy. I still show my addy as primary.


Any emails sent to this address get forwarded to my messages.

whatever. Adbook trying to get ever more inside shit I dont care to share.

RKCNDY

I can't figure out if I have that FFBFon my FB...but I also haven't updated the stupid FB app on my phone.

hid my email addy though...but my profile is private anyway.

FrankieG

The 'stalker app' is very scary but atleast you arn't automatically opted-in to that; need to opt-in to it.

But that 'Star' thing I got a reference about a while ago... That shit s creepy. You can Star any of your friends, and it will post everything that they do you your wall without elling that person.. That shits is rediculous.

mickeyrat

I would think that at this point with the tanked IPO they might want avoid pissing off their users anymore than they already have.

RKCNDY

mickeyrat wrote:

I would think that at this point with the tanked IPO they might want avoid pissing off their users anymore than they already have.

Fuckerberg doesn't care about anything else, he's made his name and money. I'm sure he has invested his money in other funds, and could live very comfortably if FB imploded today.

BinauralJam

On my last update, Christopher Ambler left this comment, which nearly summarizes why I believe the facebook email address forced opt-in is a band idea:

"Here's the rub, folks: by doing this, Facebook is going to start having a hand in the routing and transmission of your email. That is, instead of people seeing your real email address (those with whom you choose to share it, of course), they'll s...ee the Facebook email address. And when they use it, that email will go to Facebook's server before it's forwarded to you.

Do you trust Facebook having your email route through them? They'll be able, by the terms of service you've already agreed to, to scan that email. A human could read it by those terms.

And by making this change, they are essentially inserting themselves into your email flow WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION and without notification. Is that allowed by the terms of service? Arguably not!"

Security researchers refer to this sort of behaviour as a "man in the middle attack", and it's quite serious. The biggest problem I have with this is that Facebook did it without asking its users, in effect forcing it on them without explicit permission, because Facebook's TOS is heavily slanted toward the company and away from the best interests of its users.

It's important to recognize that, for a generation of Internet users, Facebook *is* the Internet. A generation of young people is being trained by Facebook to not value privacy, and to blindly trust any corporation that does something which appears cool or useful.

If someone wants to have a facebook.com email address, that's entirely their business and I'm not going to bitch about their choice; but I guarantee you that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people at this very moment who are happily giving up an enormous amount of their personal privacy because they don't understand the trade off -- or worse, they don't care, because they've been trained by Facebook and Google to willingly give up their personal information in exchange for convenience.

Facebook is useful for a lot of people, and I totally understand that. I just wish their privacy policies and forced opt-ins would change, because it's only a matter of time before some truly evil companies (cough Zynga cough) take advantage of and exploit the generation that's been trained by Facebook to blindly give up their privacy and personal information to anyone who wants it.

Not Mine

DS1119

mickeyrat wrote:

I would think that at this point with the tanked IPO they might want avoid pissing off their users anymore than they already have.

I still believe FB is going to hit the cellular market hard. Wouldn't be surprised if they take over BB actually.