“If you are on Facebook but have never taken a particular shine to Facebook’s e-mail capability, Facebook is intent on changing your mind. As of Friday, the company seems to have quietly given or replaced the display e-mail addresses of all of its users with an @facebook.com address, routing any e-mail communiques you would have received back to its own Messages inboxes.” Scummy doesn’t even begin to describe this.
Or at least as little as possible.
The more people interact with it, the higher the chance someone else has to deal with it too.
That is the network effect after all.
I don’t use it, I’m still fine.
How much does it cost? my understanding is approximately $0.00.
What else would anyone expect from a “social networking” site? Did FB ever promise to not to do something like this? If so, who believed it?
I rather wonder if this is legal, are they intercepting mail directed at other addresses and “pirating” it into FB? that might be illegal. On the other hand, do you not think that FB has spread around enough <strike>bribes </strike> campaign contributions to render themselves above the law?
“Nothing is to be had for nothing” Epictetus.
Like Lennie, I don’t use this kind of crap, and feel no ill effects. Some of my friends are compulsively fixated on FB and obsess on what they think that others think about them. Puke.
Uh, no, no hijacking. If you look at someones profile they have contact information there, and under email you now have your @facebook.com email address even if you used another email address before. There is no confusion about where mails are going. Also you of course as usual get notifications about messages forwarded to your registered “main” mail account.
I don’t really see how this is a “scam”, but changing peoples profiles without warning is indeed a bit scummy. I don’t think there is much damage done to anyone either way however.
Changes like this are what investors like to see. More control= more potential
No, but that doesn’t mean you can’t protest when they do.
Facebook isn’t “free” btw. You pay by providing them your personal data and looking at ads.
“Did FB ever promise to not to do something like this?”
I never promised that I would not come over to your house and urinate on your porch. So would that mean that you’d have no grounds for moral outrage if you walked out your door and stepped in a puddle of pee?
I tend to think that you are right about the questionable legality. At the very least, it puts Facebook into a very tenuous legal position were the security of their e-mail to be compromised. Imagine a damaging e-mail (does your company know you are looking for work? did that rash on your d*** clear up or do I need to see a doctor?) being published by a hacker who broke in to FB’s e-mail system.
I use FB as a means of logging on to forums to post comments and to “like” companies, products, etc. in order to receive discounts and free offers. That’s it. I don’t accept friend requests. I turn on all the privacy settings.
If someone is a “friend,” they have my e-mail address and/or phone number. I don’t need to get on FB and collect “friends” like some needy, tween girl seeking approval.
California will on it before long, they sue for nearly everything there.
Seriously, you call this a scam? They’ve changed their screen to hide personal email addresses by default – something people have been demanding they do for privacy reasons – and you’re calling it a scam?
Err… if you want to hide your email-adress you can do that in the profile settings. There is no reason for facebook to override its users’ settings and change their email adresses. Nor can I see how there could be any demand from users for facebook to do so.
The reson for this change is probably to have mails being realyed trough facebook’s server so that they can monitor their content. That’s why some people call it a scam.
Indeed. Calling this a scam is stupid at best as it’s absolutely not scamming people in any way.
Something else that is stupid is how people complain about Facebook’s policies as if they are paying customers of the service. Proving minimal information about yourself does not make you a paying customer, you are still a voluntary user. These people also confuse what they _think_ is or should be, as a “right” they have, are owed, or deserve. …No.
Sorry for the slight rant but this constantly recurring show of ignorance really gets old.
I changed my previous comment ’cause it was just wrong.
I agree it doesn’t really seem like a scam as suggested in the title. In the summary it says ‘scummy’, which I think is a fairer description.
Edited 2012-06-26 17:57 UTC
The summary is a bit misleading. All Facebook is doing is giving their users a free e-mail address and displaying that e-mail address on people’s profile pages. Any e-mail sent to that address lands in the user’s message box, just as you would expect it to. Nothing is being redirected or hijacked or rerouted. Facebook is just letting people send their users messages using an e-mail interface.
Except now facebook can read all mail sent to the default address.
Anyone sending you mail to your facebook address ?
Not sure how to answer your question except:
I have a facebook address?!
How would I know if email is sent there or not? Just wait around for deliveries (if indeed facebook is able to forward someplace) and read all the headers of all messages from now on?
Should I ask possible senders if they sent me email via facebook? How do I find those senders?
I just tried to send to my facebook account… whoops, they block my ip due to PBL, something my originally listed domain’s mx does not use…
% host -t mx facebook.com
facebook.com mail is handled by 10 smtpin.mx.facebook.com.
% host smtpin.mx.facebook.com.
smtpin.mx.facebook.com has address 69.171.244.11
% telnet 69.171.244.11 25
‘Trying 69.171.244.11…
Connected to 69.171.244.11.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
554 5.7.1 POL-P1 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Connection to 69.171.244.11 closed by foreign host.
I thought nobody was ever going to beat Apple’s secret Safari installs via their update utility.
But we have a new champion! Take a bow Facebook.
Facebook, if you’re reading this; These tactics DON’T WORK. All they do is piss off your customers.
No they don’t. I thought everyone knew by now that Facebook’s actual customers are the advertising partners, who are probably loving this.
The users aren’t customers, they are the product being sold to the advertisers.
Amen brother!
Precisely. I made the same point about Kindles a while ago: http://www.whatdigitalrevolution.com/?p=202&page=3
I have one word for you: Unswindle. That’ll solve just about all of your Kindle problems
If it wasn’t for the fact that I make use of facebook’s one click sign in for a lot of sites, I’d not bother logging into it at all.
Unfortunatly I have friends and family who, prefer not to use email anyway and the only way to contact them online is via facebook. For them, email is just an annonyance of setting up their facebook account, and I’m pretty sure if you sign up via mobile you can just use your phone number now. I’ve logged in using my mobile number a few times in the past.
So, based on the above, I struggle to see how most people will care. Its not as if they even check their email inbox anyway.
For the rest of us who would use the network and did have a prefered email for contact, its not a good thing. What’s next they require you to login with it? or maybe they’ll buy a few billion phone numbers and issue everyone their own personal facebook sms number to use.
If it was a EU or UK company, they’d have not got away with this under the data protection act.
Hate to say it, but anybody naive enough about FB to be surprised by this deserves what they get. Look at the folks posting here who don’t get it. Caveat emptor.
Yes, I, who am a Facebook user, has certainly been shown the error of my ways. How dare they give me a free email address? How dare they give people who visit my profile on Facebook a way to contact me on Facebook? Hiding my main email address is a slightly icky move, but this is hardly the day of reckoning for Facebook users. Don’t be so dramatic.
I find facebook (and the products and services that connect to it) to be invasive and creepy. off-putting
My @facebook.com “email address” appears in my information but under privacy it lists “Only me”, while my real email address appears as displayed to “Friends”. I might have done something to explicitly hide the fake email from Facebook, I can’t remember when but I’m not affected by this latest change. But then again, I’m still enjoying my classic timeline-free profile.
However, we all know that Facebook makes ALL of its money from advertising and it maximizes its profit via extensive datamining. This is a fact of doing business.
So rather than whine and cry about Facebook’s unethical behavior, I personally just limit my usage. I have little more than my professional info on there, stuff that is publically available on other web sites anyway.
The problem is not a FB mail service itself, but the fact that they are actually forcing their users to use whatever FB likes them to use.
Now, I’m not a FB user [I find their policies way too restrictive], but I can actually imagine a point of view where this is not a problem. One could always say: “well, you got what you agreed with. Terms of use accepted? don’t whine now”.
Scummy? Maybe slightly. Scam – no.
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