You may not have noticed it yet, but your primary email address listed as your Facebook contact has been changed to a Facebook email address without you being informed and without your consent. The social-networking site has quietly replaced your default email addresses such as Gmail and Yahoo! with your @Facebook.com address, an email service option the company launched a few years ago and synced with Timeline in April. “Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack,” Gervase Markham wrote, referring to a tactic hackers use to intercept electronic messages. “What on earth do they think they are playing at?” “Presumptuous,” declared Forbes.com.
Still, as Gizmodo puts it to the company, “Facebook, it’s probably safe to say that the way we all had our things before was the ‘choice’ we made about ‘which addresses…show on [our] timelines.‘ This wasn’t about choice—in fact, it was the opposite. You chose for us.” Late last year, in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Facebook got slapped with 20 years of audits and a required “opt in” feature — as opposed to its usual opt out — for any changes it made to the privacy policy. Although the email switch was not associated with privacy features, many users would have preferred to opt in to use the @facebook.com address instead of having to manually change back to their preferred public email.
That’s the kind of change Facebook users tend to get very angry about when they’re not warned in advance — and it’s something Facebook has a bad habit of doing. The site is notorious for its “mess up and apologize” approach. The least to say, is that Facebook knows for sure that most of its users won’t switch back to their initial mail just because of the hassle or mere negligence. For me it is a very suspicious move a simple email informing its 900 million users would have been all it is needed. Facebook is forcing itself on its users like never before.
Forbes summed up the conventional wisdom on Monday with a simple headline on its post: “Facebook’s Lame Attempt To Force Its Email Service On You.”
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