Facebook e-mail account

Facebook e-mail account

A couple of weeks ago I seemed to acquire a facebook e-mail account. I have never asked for one, do not desire one, but when it comes to facebook, what does it matter what I or any other of their users think?

I looked for it this evening. I had to delve into settings to find it. At first I thought it had come and gone, but no, there is was, buried under secondary e-mail address in my e-mail settings.

Whilst I was rooting around, I thought I would check facebook apps. I have never signed up for any facebook apps, and yet there was half a dozen facebook apps. Some seemed to be sites I had visited, eg New York Times, but others I had never heard of eg Cities I have Visited.

Check out your face book apps. More important check out what they have access to.

Never use facebook apps. They have access to all your personal data. Do you know where it is going, who has access to that information? Do you even know who is behind the facebook apps?

If you are on spotify, it broadcasts what you are doing to everyone on facebook. It pays artists a pittance. Do not use spotify.

Delete all your facebook apps.

Do not use facebook to sign in to other sites. Do you wish the sites to share data on you?

Delete all personal information on facebook. Would you give it to a stranger in the street? If no, then why do you hand it to the world via facebook?

But if you delete personal data on facebook, it still exists in their archives. I suggest therefore you overwrite with false data first, then delete.

Being given an e-mail address by facebook seems innocuous enough, but nothing facebook does is innocuous.

There has been a storm of protest. Those who have their phones synched to facebook, have had their address books rewritten, facebook has hijacked their e-mail address and replaced with a facebook e-mail address, e-mails have gone missing.

Have I lost e-mails? I do not know, and that is the problem. How do you know you have lost something you never knew you had?

Rachel Luxemburg writes:

Today, a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work e-mail address with my Facebook e-mail address. He discovered this only after sending work e-mails to the wrong address. 

And even worse, the e-mails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked. 

They’ve vanished into the ether. 

For all I know, I could be missing a lot more e-mails from friends, colleagues, or family members, and never even know it.

On Hacker News:

This morning my mother was complaining that many of the e-mail 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 e-mails and contact photos, and decided to migrate all her Facebook-using contacts over to this convenient new system.

On Slashdot:

I sync my phone with Facebook for many of my contacts. Now I have an address book full of bogus e-mail addresses where they were correct before.

And just when you think this cannot get worse, Apple have kindly integrated their operating system with facebook so your address book gets updated without you even being notified!

On HN:

Crap thing changed the primary e-mail address of the contacts in my iPhone iOS 6.

This cannot be overstated: e-mail is being intercepted and goes who knows where!

Let us get this straight: Wikileaks hands to the public information on Big Government and Big Business and they are a bunch of criminals with Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuador Embassy in London fearing extradition to the US. Facebook hands your personal information to corporate criminals and the company gets a ridiculous overinflated valuation on Wall Street.

When something is free, always remember you are the product on sale.

Top Story in Ediscovery and DataProtection Daily (Monday 2 July 2012).

• Walled gardens and private groups within
• Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered; e-mail lost
• Facebook changed your e-mail address, here’s how you can change it back
• Apple iOS 6 and the Facebook email address lock-in?
• And I’m The Villain?
• Facebook: the most congenitally dishonest company in America

Tags: e-mail, facebook, Facebook e-mail account, privacy, social networks