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Facebook Forces Email Switch, Angers Users
In what many Facebook users are still just discovering or may not even know about is that the company has changed your default email address to an @facebook.com address. It doesn't matter if you use it or not, the switch was still made and posted on your profile. The backlash due to these actions has been fairly substantial. Freelance tech journalist Ron Miller tweeted "Speaking of hating your users. Facebook forces everyone onto its email system. Really, Facebook?! Really?!" Furthermore a blogger by the name of Gervase Markham who was apparently one of the first to draw attention to the issue has said the following: "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," he went further by saying "What on earth do they think they are playing at?" Facebook has reacted with surprise to the hostile comments and angry reactions by many users bloggers and journalists. While the move was announced back in April it garnered no interest, thus the angry reaction today. Meredith Chin, Manager of Product Communications for Facebook tried to explain away the change while repeating the word "consistent" multiple times while trying to reinforce why the company made the decision in the first place. Users can however still change back to their old email address if they wish, but few even know a change took place.
That said this isn't that surprising when you think about it, Facebook is after all fairly notorious for messing up and then apologizing afterwards on a regular basis. What do our readers think? Tell us your thoughts below.
You have two options for any email addresses associated with your Facebook profile: "shown on Timeline" or "hidden from Timeline." By default, Facebook is setting your @facebook.com address to be "shown on Timeline" and hiding the rest. To change that, switch your @facebook.com email address to be "hidden from Timeline," and set a different email to be "shown on Timeline."
Posted by | Tue, Jun 26, 2012 - 10:14 AM
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