People saying it's no big deal either never used Facebook to grab e-mails for parties/weddings/celebrations.<p>All my friends have emails, and most of them have Facebook, but not all of them check Facebook that often or only have Facebook to not become a social outcast. You either need to contact them by phone or by email if you need something from them in some immediate time frame. Add to that the fact that there are more emails listed on the site than phone numbers so your primary option is email them.<p>So now those people who haven't bothered checking Facebook cannot be contacted because that email address just routes back to Facebook. It negates the whole point of having your email listed, which is for your friends to contact you in some non-Facebook way.<p>And Facebook just has a fetish with mucking with your personal settings. It's the only company that routinely does this kind of thing without bothering to say anything about it.
This is a really stupid move. If someone is viewing my profile and looking for an email address, they're not looking for this one. If that was the case they could just message me through the website.<p>This even affected profiles that listed 2 or more email addresses.
I just checked my profile and I saw that my facebook e-mail address was shared with 'only me', likely due to other privacy choices I made and that it stopped sharing my real e-mail address. I think this might have had the effect where people wouldn't see any e-mail address shared. (Although one can easily derive the @facebook.com e-mail address anyway.)<p>Also, this change just generally makes it harder to make use of other social sites. Need the person's e-mail address to add them on LinkedIn? Need to scrape e-mail addresses of your friends to invite them to another service (as was talked about a lot a few years ago)? Can't do either in many cases if your friends just show their @facebook addresses.<p>Edit: Well, for LinkedIn that would only work if the person associated their facebook.com address with LinkedIn, which I don't think people do. For the latter, it could still work but the person would strangely hear about the other service via Facebook (which I suppose Facebook could 'lose' those messages if it became a problem) and it could be hard to look people up by their more common e-mail addresses.
Here is how to resolve the issue:
<a href="http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account" rel="nofollow">http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account</a>
Another one of Facebook's privacy "escapades". Sigh! I thought by now they would have got these things right but it looks like "privacy" is always going to be "bête noire" of Facebook.
I sent a test email to my new @facebook.com email address from both my regular email account and another test email account I own. Neither ended up in either my Facebook messages list or being redirected to my real email. I have no idea where the messages went. Nice one!<p>At least I've found out about it now and have been able to remove the address from my profile.
This is even lamer than general because FB Messages is an awesome product on its own (a reliable way to message or IM people with little risk of spamfiltering), and absolutely didn't need a heavy-handed push like this to be successful. Now, FB Messages is tainted with "product people didn't like, so we'll force them to use it".
I've been trying to find out how much of this change has to do with iOS 6's Facebook integration. I remember having to re-do my contacts two weeks ago and this was a HUGE issue because, as Swang 5 said, i had to basically call or SMS everyone to get their e-mails into my contact lists.<p>Really big inconvenience.
It sounds more like they're providing an email to every user with the options set to public by default. While that could be construed as bad, it shouldn't override another email if that other email is marked as public.
I can't imagine why they decided email addresses now needed two layers of privacy controls. First layer = who can see this, second layer = is it visible on timeline. If I didn't want it visible on the timeline, why wouldn't I just select "Only me" on the first option...? Am I trying to keep my email private from myself?<p>They also only made the change for email addresses -- not IM usernames, etc. If the two layers were to help with privacy somehow, why not apply it to everything?
Wait a minute.. did they do this to just hide emails from spammers?? or did they actually replace your email address with your official facebook email address?
Either they put everything back, or some accounts haven't gotten hit yet. My "primary" email is still listed as my personal email address. I can change it to be the @facebook.com one, but that's just listed as my "Facebook email".
This is a big problem. But the only way it will be known as a big problem is if G+ puts some money behind a PR effort. I think this is a great opportunity for G+ to increase it's user base.
How about not using facebook? I just don't see the value in it. The most people post any bullshit on facebook like "I'm in the train now. It's warm here." I think it's a waste of lifetime to read such things. There are a lot of other things to do and new things to explore, which are more fun and don't monitor your activities all the day.
Is it time yet for a campaign of intentional misinformation across Facebook?<p>Is there anything that is more a threat to Facebook than misinformation? I am sure they track IP and where you are hitting the local switches and routers, on top of the location you provide, but is it time to provide false location and demographic info to spread a marketing virus. What would make advertisers shy off more than discovering that the demographic info is trash and even more useless than the trash Facebook now hocks.
It's time to dump Facebook and use Zurker (still in beta, you'd need an invite). Here's the invitation link:<p><a href="http://www.zurker.in/i-29371-ohhlpiiglq" rel="nofollow">http://www.zurker.in/i-29371-ohhlpiiglq</a>