This morning my mother was complaining that many of the email addresses in her Droid Razr contacts had been replaced with Facebook ones. It would seem the Facebook app had been populating her address book with emails and contact photos, and decided to migrate all her Facebook-using contacts over to this convenient new system. That seems like a much greater controversy to me than Facebook hiding people's email addresses.
Yes, and how about iMessage and FaceTime that require email addresses in contacts to work? And also the 3rd party sites that rely on Facebook OAuth API to identify users based on emails (they could use uids, but I'm sure some are still using email).
Conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this move might have anything to do with the new facebook integration in iOS... millions of iPhones are about to start automatically pulling contact info from facebook, wouldn't it be nice if all those people started using their @facebook.com email address?
Since this change, I haven't seen any difference in my contacts. It looks like it's still pulling all available email addresses, not just facebook.com ones.
I'm afraid the details of the iOS 6 features other than what's announced in WWDC are still under NDA (which you signed when you gain access to the developer beta). So perhaps you want to remove that comment.
This completely blows away the "let's the users sign up using facebook, we store their email and if we ever decide to ditch the FB login, we can always email them a password reset"
I'm a different person and I haven't tested it, but I would think it would ignore the new "show on timeline" field when retrieving via the API which would in effect return whatever e-mail addresses it used to return in addition to (assuming people don't change their settings) the new @facebook.com address.
It would be great if someone would check this, though.
Well, that email issue on the phones seems to be a design issue with the OS, and not Facebook's overall fault.
On my Windows phone, if I have a Windows Live contact (the base contact saving system) with an email, and then port in Facebook contacts that match, it merges the accounts into one "profile" and it doesn't overwrite emails; it saves both emails and tells me where each one came from. Maybe if Android had a better system, this wouldn't have happened?
It's not Facebook's job to take something like that into account.
Obligatory jwz quote: ``Zawinski's law of software envelopment''
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
(obviously Myspace did not read mail ;-))
[EDIT]
In response to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patrickaljord below, Myspace introduced email service in mid-2009. Perhaps the above should read, ``(obviously Myspace did not read mail back then when it mattered ;-))''
Amusingly, facebook dropped 2 out of 3 test messages from the other address facebook knows about. Seriously, if anything should be whitelisted, it's that.
I understand that they want to read my mail. They want to know who i interact with.
Why make such a shitty mail client? No POP. no IMAP. Can't view headers. It's not clear how much html is allowed, because they're dropping to many messages.
They're not even pretending it's a serious offering. They're just screwing around with settings.
I don't think the above is true. I currently have two email addresses in my profile. My personal one, and the Facebook one. Both are set to "Me Only", and also "Hidden from profile"
I understand that they want to read my mail. They want to know who i interact with.
But why do you put up with that?
Not having a Facebook account is starting to make me feel like an anti-social loser. But I just can't get over how creepy they are. How do other people live with that?
I think it's also another aspect of / attempt at lock-in.
Pre Facebookitization of profile email addresses, if you wanted to communicate outside of Facebook or even begin to exit FB altogether, you had a ready means of staying in touch with at least those FB friends who displayed an email address on their profile.
Now, you are stuck with FB to stay in touch, unless/until you and each such friend exchange a non-FB email address or other means of contact.
P.S. As an example of the former, any time a FB friend wants to discuss a health-related issue, the first thing I do is take the conversation outside FB.
In my experience, test messages never work, but real messages always do
Obviously you can confirm that the real messages that you do receive gets through. What about those that didn't? How do you know that they didn't? How do you know no such messages exist?
Are you being naive here or am I missing some sarcasm?
I'm pretty sure a html 3.5 subset is what's rendered by mail clients. At least, gmail uses font to change fonts, and span to change color. they were both ignored.
this was the raw string gmail generated:
abc <b>def</b> <i>ghi </i><u>jkl</u><i> </i><font face=3D"comic sans ms, sa=
ns-serif">mno</font><i> </i><font face=3D"courier new, monospace">pqr</font=
><i> </i><font size=3D"6">stu</font> <span style=3D"background-color:rgb(25=
5,0,0)">vwx</span><div>
But to be fair, they've said everyone with a Facebook username gets username@facebook.com. You can visit a profile, look at the URL, and put 2 and 2 together. It'd be worse if it was a randomized, private email address that was made public.
It's one thing to just hide a piece of information a user asked you to publish on their behalf. It's another to remove it, and then replace it with a nearly identical element because it's preferable to you from a business perspective.
The latter is why folks are upset; simply hiding all listed emails, or adding in the @facebook emails on profiles, would probably not have generated as many complaints.
True, but there is a fine line. You cannot reasonably move a product forward if a few select people refuse to play along. Every product I release, I'm met with disdain from users that don't want to change, and how it was perfect the way it was. And the next release with a different change, it's the same users complaining how the version that they're using now is perfect, why would I change things?
People love to complain, and people don't like change.
There is no fine line here. Facebook changed a personal attribute of their users. This particular action is not justifiable under any circumstances I can see.
The only justification i can see is that it's facebook, and this is pretty much the sort of behaviour i expect from facebook. i have a hard time getting outraged over behaviour that is totally in character.
They're ethically obligated to hide infomation users don't want released, but are they really expected to publish everything their users ask to make public? It's annoying, but it doesn't spur anything like the moral outrage I would feel if they publicized your hidden addresses. At worst its a minor inconvenience.
It's less about convenience and more about assuming the ability to modify a primary attribute of one's online identity without advance notice.
People will sit back, be quiet, and move along and Facebook will progressively march forward with the invasion and the general populace will scream about it until it's too late.
I'm not aware of a definition of reasonableness that hinges on the behavior of just "a few select people." To wit: if 100% participation is required, it's not reasonable.
It seems like they didn't change your previous preferences but rather added a new one and changed how they interpret preferences as to what is displayed.
If you look at your list of e-mail addresses, it will let you choose who to share it with if it should be shown on timeline.
Previously I had a real e-mail address that was being shared with friends and another real address that was for 'only me'.
When I looked at my preferences today, I saw that those settings remained intact and that it added a third @facebook.com address that was being shared with only me.
I think the second field might be brand new. It says either "Shown on timeline" or "Hidden on timeline" and when I looked today it showed both of the email addresses that I had previously set up as hidden and the new facebook.com one as shown. If they would have just marked the e-mail address that I had set up to be shared with friends as "shown" and added the @facebook.com address as "shown", I (and suspect many others) would be happy and it would still allow them to emphasize that people can use @facebook.com e-mail addresses. (Some people might not like this for spam reasons, but I think this is would be far less evil than what they did.)
Also, since they don't share e-mail addresses via the social graph or have other ways of viewing data, what is the point of differentiating 'show on timeline' with specifying who you share it with? None of the other fields (phone number, IM screen name, address etc.) include this "show on timeline field" but rather set visibility based on the sharing settings. It seems like the "show on timeline" field is completely unnecessary and was only added to get the effect that we're all talking about. (So this was clearly evilness rather than incompetence; for some preference system changes one could argue that it was necessary to 'break' old preferences since the new ones were so different, but that isn't the case here.)
FWIW, I had my real email addresses showing before this weekend and when I checked this morning, the only email address that was being shown was the @facebook.com one. My other 2 email addresses (one visible to each of my friends and one only to a close few) were hidden from my timeline. Shady!!
I can confirm. I had my wife check my account, and she has the most liberal viewing privileges of my profile out of anyone I know. She now only sees a @facebook.com email address. My primary address, @gmail.com, is no longer visible under Contact Info on my profile.
I had the same experience. I don't make my email address public, but I do have it visible to friends - sharing contact info among selected groups is one of the few things Facebook is useful for. When I checked earlier, my real email was hidden from everyone and my friends were only seeing the @facebook.com address.
I'm having the same experience, but I only had a single email address previously (the one I signed up with years ago) and it was visible to friends until this update.
It's safe to assume that the vast majority of users fit this case: signed up with an email address, never added a second one.
Since it affects this use case.. I'm going to posit that this is quite widespread.
Based on reading another post here, I think other e-mail addresses can still be retrieved via Facebook APIs if the user grants permission for them. I was thinking only about the timeline display and the general open graph use cases and neglected the "give extra permissions" open graph use case. Still, I don't see a good reason why there would be differentiation between what is displayed and what is given by the UI (after accounting for who is being shared with) for e-mail addresses versus those other fields.
There are three discussions about this on the front page :-/ .
I think this is just might be one of those things which would ticks us off as techies... but techies are the minority audience for sites like facebook.
Do emails sent to the facebook id go to the standard facebook 'message system'? If so, for a majority of people this will probably make sense... want to message somebody on facebook? You don't have to login to facebook! Email them at xyz@facebook.com. I didn't know you could do that, pretty sure a lot of other people didn't either. Now a lot of folks probably are updated about this feature.
In addition: non-techies who have accidentally exposed their private email id's will now have their facebook id's scraped instead... and the ones who exposed their private emails intentionally will change it back anyway.
However, all said and done... it could have been done differently.
I dunno, the first I heard it from was from non techies. As a techie, I don't really care as I don't keep the account connected to a primary email nor do i use it in my main browser...but to a non-techie, this all but makes it sound like that Facebook is aggressively entering their personal domain...even though it's highly naive to think that what goes on in FB stays on FB, this should be alarming to those who were deluded
> If so, for a majority of people this will probably make sense... want to message somebody on facebook? You don't have to login to facebook! Email them at xyz@facebook.com.
There are easy ways to advertise this fact, without changing anyone's personal info in their Facebook account. It could be as simple as adding the text "You can also send messages to JaneDoe@facebook.com" to JaneDoe's profile page.
I do agree - it could have (and possibly should have) been done differently. I was trying rationalize facebook's action. It's a hugely successful company run by people smarter than I.
In 99% of cases, ppl didn't reveal their private email address. NOW, people can infer your facebook email address from your facebook id... thus making spamming you much more likely. Facebook IDs are public, right?
You can argue people can already mass-message people, but now it's easier.
If you compose an email to multiple @facebook.com addresses, I'm sure Facebook will limit the actual number of recipients in the same way that they do when you send messages through the Facebook message interface, so it's really no different.
With 3rd party spam, the advantage Facebook has here is Zuck's "social graph" -- they can pretty easily tell what the relationship of the sender is in relation to the recipient (and thus how relevant the message is, what the sender's reputation is, etc). It'd be interesting to see how these connections are made when the sender's email address is not associated with a Facebook account, though.
It'd be interesting to see how these connections are made when the sender's email address is not associated with a Facebook account, though.
You think FB isn't in (or aspiring to) negotiations with ConstantContact, CampaignMOnitor, MailChimp, etc.? Triangulating preferences, deep dives, data warehousing, you name it.
yep, that's what I was getting into. It seems FB wants users to use their facebook email as their regular email address. So it would make sense if they get emails from newsletters, online bills, strangers, anyone...
Plus they get an added bonus of people who have already stopped logging in, plus those who quit based on this move, having an fb.com email for posterity unless they login one last time and chnage it.
I haven't had problems with G+ specifically, but I did have to delete my gmail account (which I only created so I could access the android app store) because it was impossible to have a gmail address without it being my "primary" address for all things google-related.
Facebook at least manages to let me hide the facebook.com address.
One big thing that had a real impact on me was removal of the social features in Google Reader. I'd also argue that removing the ubiquitous "subscribe to this site via RSS" icon in the location bar was also damaging. RSS readers are a boon to the open, eclectic web, and any action that reduces their use is damaging, in my opinion.
They did nothing to change the RSS portion of Google Reader, the rss icon is a Chrome issue and is easily solved with one of a dozen extensions. The feature they removed was "sharing" and that was really ancillary to Reader/rss anyway.
Except when they killed that feature, they killed a community of people sharing. I'm friends with the same people on G+, but we all share a lot less now. Why? So that Google could promote G+.
Other people clearly agree with me. Is there a reason you feel this way? You can still subscribe to and read RSS feeds. As I said, the sharing aspect you mention, while a part of Google Reader, had nothing to do with RSS (the idea OR protocol) and was an add-on.
Naturally as Google wanted to unite social strategies they shifted "Sharing on Reader" to "Sharing on G+". I don't see why that's shocking or terribly hard to cope with.
And most of all I don't know why me expressing that makes me a troll. Or are you just angry and unable to articulate yourself outside of calling me names?
What is your problem? Again, do you have anything to say? You realize that by calling people names and not engaging in discussion, you're acting precisely like a troll, right?
Forced integration of G+ with Gmail, maps, youtube etc...
The toolbar that is present across all services that is the G+ alert bar...
As well as the fact that by default all your use of all Google products would be captured. You have to opt out of all google tracking to turn that off.
While I wont call it being forced, it was an edict which you had plenty of time opting out from prior to it occurring...
I removed it under my real name, maintain an identity under a pseudonym, and do much of my use of various Google products without logging in / authenticating.
Google tried to get users to link their gmail accounts and youtube accounts. Thus, if someone sent you a youtube link in gmail and you clicked it - you would be logged into youtube already/automatically so that they can track your viewing behavior.
Actually, that was the whole point. They were not allowed to due to their separate service agreements/privacy policies.
Then, early in Q1 2012, presumably as part of the whole G+ ecosystem push, they unified/changed their Privacy Policy terms across all (most?) services which users also had to accept.
The only thing that was ever really "Forced" from google was when all my google plus circle's appeared in my android phone and I had to manually move them into different groups in my contacts to get it to stop.
> What has Google "forced upon users" with Google+?
If I remember correctly, on launch I suddenly had a profile that was rather cryptic to opt-OUT of and I somehow (despite never having added them) still PUBLICLY show up as a contact/friend of some guy I know who is using gmail and google+ and with whom I sent a few emails back and forth in the past.
With Facebook making this change, I guess anyone who is unaware of this and syncs their Facebook contacts to their phone (either directly or via apps) stands to lose the 'real' email addresses of their friends and especially once they sync back to their desktop/cloud/gmail etc!!
On my Android the Facebook details are in a separate bucket than my Gmail contact details. So the Facebook sync hasn't overridden the email addresses that were manually entered by me or have been synced by Google's Contacts.
But on the other hand I'm seeing a lot of new Facebook email addresses in my contacts.
I'm actually not able to change my email settings currently. It forced my real email to "not public" mode and my facebook email to "public" and the buttons are unresponsive. I also can't "remove this from my timeline" either.
Update: A few hard refreshes later, the buttons started to work.
Same happened to me. I think their email settings servers/subsystem is just getting hammered right now as more and more news articles are being written about this.
Wow. This thread just alerted me to the existence of that 'other' mailbox. I had no clue that existed. That could have saved me some trouble; I just found this message from last July:
I just wonder how many millions of messages that have gone unnoticed. I've seen a few articles written, alerting people to it's existence, but it's not like people are searching for articles on things they don't know exist.
Well, yeah. I'm mostly just jabbing at them in frustration at how much other people buy into centering their lives around FB... but I'm not a total luddite. :) Every once-in-a-while, someone from high school wants to get in touch with me and FB is a decent enough honey pot.
That said, I am enough of a luddite to not see the need to have a Twitter account.
I generally don't participate in "social media". My Facebook is mostly of invites, updates to businesses I am interested in.
I would argue a Twitter account is much more interesting than a Facebook account. Quite a few notable people have Twitter and they are mostly interesting or funny reads.
Timeline was rolled out to all accounts only as an option, I believe.
I'm still on the "old" profile, as are many (if not most) of my friends. Yet to see a hard push to switch over, though I'm sure it'll come any day now.
Are you sure? I still don't have it (thankfully). I'm probably on the tail end of their rollout though. Might help that I hardly ever use Facebook anymore.
I can't stand timeline. I find it really difficult to read them for some reason - probably something to do with having more than one column - and poor alignment - it's cognitively difficult.
Echoing the above, I don't have timeline yet either. Does it have something to do with the age of the account, I wonder? I've been on FB since sometime in 2006.
On a side note, I didn't do anything to keep the old display style, I just didn't manually switch myself to the new timeline, and they never auto adopted me over.
This is nothing but a fairly desperate attempt to gain email address share, and promote Facebook lock-in.
Think about Joe Average User who spends a bunch of time on Facebook. If people start emailing them at JoeAverageUser@Facebook.com, then they can scarcely abandon the site...
So I just disabled the Facebook contacts sync on my phone, because as of today it is useless for me. I'm also thinking of uninstalling the Facebook app, because the web interface is good enough for me, and I kept the Facebook app just for the contacts sync.
Good luck with that. I can't uninstall the facebook app because my carrier decided that this app is not optional. It just can't uninstall.
Android Samsung Galaxy S2 on Rogers
Root it, install titanium backup, remove it (if its not rootable then there is no way that im aware of).
That's what I did for my HTC desire so I could remove the crapware (fb app included) on it.
Why is the facebook sync useless to you? Our service (connex.io) also syncs with facebook (among others) and we are always interested in learning more about our customers. If you feel like explaining it to me in a bit more detail, you can send me an e-mail: michael@connex.io. Or you can just answer here and I'll follow the thread.
I only wish that when Facebook gave away my email when I connected with other sites that they gave away the Facebook email address. As it is, I almost never give permission to sites because most require an email address. I do not wish to share my real email address just to read an article that has shown up on my newsfeed, but would gladly share my @facebook.com email address
As it is right now, I have a unique email address setup for Facebook on one of my domains. If anyone sends email to it other than Facebook, it gets instantly marked as spam.... I only wonder why I'm giving Facebook a pass and not marking their emails as spam too.
Try right clicking (or menu key), copy the url, open new tab (CTRL+T), go to location bar (CTRL + L), and paste (CTRL + V). It's the Javascript I think that hijacks the click.
Alternatively, click Cancel when it asks you to add the app, and it will redirect to the original article. I think this is what annoys me most on Facebook.
Not sure if this has always been a "feature" of Facebook's email service, but apparently you can login with the facebook email address. A would-be hacker only needs to guess your password.
Case in point: a friend has already told me there have been renewed attempts to log into her account from other locations and devices.
Reminds me of foursquare. I can't, for the life of me, get it to post pictures to my facebook feed any longer. I've tried reinstalling, posting with a camera picture, posting with a gallery picture, relinking facebook, tapping the icon on and off, making sure picture is public, etc..
I'm pretty sure they disabled this functionality so they can show the map instead which gets them more clicks into their site proper and helps their traffic. Really pisses me off because I take a picture every check in and think they are more interesting and don't think people should be forced into foursquare to view them and don't want to have to post them separately - then in their marketing material for the new face lift they even show a picture of a facebook post with a picture. Lies.
I already use google as my preferred giant corporation with access to every email I send. I wish there was a way to turn off all facebook messages or at least send an auto-reply saying that I rarely respond to facebook messages.
Does it give you a friendly email address or is it just random numbers (or your fb id)? For instance, if your facebook username is "AznHisoka" do they display aznhisoka@facebook.com ?
Well, this is actually a good thing given Facebook's mission, "Making the world more open and connected."
To do this, you have to have public profiles. Do you want your personal email to show up on public profiles? But Facebook email, on the other hand, probably doesn't matter (at least not right now when the "open" paradigm is still in infancy.). Its OK to be shown to random people and search engines and other features that come down the pipeline.
It's a brilliant plan, really. What they really wanted is for everyone to list their real email address, but they knew that if they forced that, everybody would be up in arms, so they forced the opposite change instead.
Does anyone know how to forward that address to a real email address which I can access with an email program? Is there an Facebook API for those Messages? Facebook chat can be easily plugged into my XMPP client (except for group chats).
I'd rather not delete that address because I do not want someone else to have it. But as it is now the email ends up in a subfolder of Messages called "Other" and I am in no way notified about them unless I happen to click on Messages and recognize the small unread count beneath "Other".
The sad thing is that Facebook probably thought "Hidden from Timeline" was the appropriate setting since every opt-out thing they've done in the past has bit them in the ass. Now they do an opt-in for "Shown on Timeline" and they get bitched out.
The only unfortunate thing is that you cannot see emails to which you should have access to that are not marked as "Shown on Timeline". Complain about bad UX, not a security (in some ways) setting that is opt-in.
I assume that this is an attempt to take advertising revenue away from other webmail providers. So if facebook's users become predominantly known by their facebook email address then their friends will just begin sending directly to that address and bypassing other systems.
This has got me thinking that it's time to ditch Facebook. I'd like to use Google+ because I think they're more likely to be a trustworthy steward of my data, but I find the UI really confusing. Are there any other realistic alternatives?
You what this is? This is money people having too much say on the product.
I have no doubts this is so they have one more metric to impress (number of emails exchanged thru Facebook). Then they will proceed to selling paid messages for advertisers.
I checked my settings and already hid my facebook.com email. My non-facebook address was sill visible. Anyone else not have the problem from this HN article link? I keep up on my privacy settings.
Not sure if it is related, but I noticed my "Political Views" entry was also removed quite recently. Was previously "other". Anyone notice similar changes to user info?
Displaying FB addresses is not so bad, what I'm more concerned about is that I just tried sending mail to some of my friends' facebook addresses and nothing shows up..
"Force" seems a little strong. However, I am surprised I heard nothing about it until the change was already made. That's the part that makes me uneasy.
My point was not to equate the murderous behavior. I see that you might find such a comparison distressing.
Facebook is circling the wagons on its user base. I see no one this benefits other than Facebook itself.
While promoting effortless and frictionless sharing of every last minute detail of daily life and thought within the Facebook "family", they are now very actively creating massive amounts of friction in order to prevent people from sharing with the same people anywhere else.
They are closing the exits in a defensive move to prevent people from leaving.
This is not good social behavior. This is what cults and psychopaths do in order to exert control.
This looks like the behavior of an entity with mal intent.
The fact that you can easily change it back doesn't make it ok for FB to make these kinds of sweeping changes. Again, FB shows its poor stewardship of user account data. I'll happily continue only using G+.
Alright, I'm tired of this. Can everyone please shut the hell up about Facebook 'forcing' people to change their e-mail address? Facebook isn't forcing you to do shit.
They changed the default e-mail address that appears in your profile. I'm happy about this. It means all my Facebook friends have a way of contacting me that isn't my primary e-mail address, meaning that type of communication is easily compartmentalized and thus taken care of.
Facebook is the electronic total surveillance, just on a voluntary base. They have enough users and nobody seems to care much about it, so it won't get better.
I really feel this is the right moment to give other social networks a chance. I am so tired of FB and all their antics . If only my friends were there on G+.....
I am really glad that G+ does not give right access to external apps. It prevents the network from getting spammed , help to maintain cleanliness of the content and really helps in relevant discussions rather then water my farm kind of posts.
They made me a new email address that I don't want and then told all of my friends that it was the one to contact me at on my behalf. And they also didn't tell me. Dick move.
Did you check your profile, not your settings? My email settings were unchanged, but on my public profile they were different and had been set to a facebook address.
I think it's easy to understate the importance of this, personally, and don't mind the multiple stories. I'm extremely annoyed at this - I don't want this email address, that I do not control, be published as some kind of contact point for me.
It's a big deal, and there's no "canonical" link, so it's not surprising that multiple stories got enough upvotes to be on the front page. Also if you had public email addresses, it hid them. That's not cool.
