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Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

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Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#121

About an year ago, when the story blew up about the Facebook app sneaking through your phone contacts and adding friends numbers' to your Facebook account. I instantly deleted the Facebook app from my Android, and told my friends Facebook was clearly not reliable to have an app privilege on your phone. I called it that they would eventually do even worse, if you let them have an app in your phone. The general consens…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#122

About an year ago, when the story blew up about the Facebook app sneaking through your phone contacts and adding friends numbers' to your Facebook account. I instantly deleted the Facebook app from my Android, and told my friends Facebook was clearly not reliable to have an app privilege on your phone. I called it that they would eventually do even worse, if you let them have an app in your phone. The general consens…

The part about "Facebook sneaking through contacts and adding friends' numbers" isn't correct: the Facebook app has always had a pretty clear description about what would happen if contact sync (an optional feature) is enabled.

For example, on iOS, it looked like this almost two years back: http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/iPhoneNumber.png (as seen on this page from October 2010: http://www.marismith.com/facebook-phonebook-how-safe-your-ce...) I don't have any old screenshots of the Android version, but the current app is similar to the iOS screenshots above.

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#124
I feel so sad that there is no competing product out there and thus FB has the balls to repeatedly treat its users insignificantly.

It's even more sad FB is using it (the fact that all of my friends are on FB and hence I wouldn't switch) to take undue advantage in a way that I would not permit had they asked me.

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#125

Facebook simply doesn't have an ethical central core. They've shown over and over that when user privacy or security conflict with facebook's goals, they'll choose facebook over the user. It's always relatively subtle; they strive to only do what they can get away with...but it's always pushing the line, and is never based on trying to do what's right, merely avoiding backlash. Facebook, the company, is kind of a soc…

The "don't be evil" moment will be when people really start pulling the plug en masse.

I mean the advertisers.

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#126

Facebook simply doesn't have an ethical central core. They've shown over and over that when user privacy or security conflict with facebook's goals, they'll choose facebook over the user. It's always relatively subtle; they strive to only do what they can get away with...but it's always pushing the line, and is never based on trying to do what's right, merely avoiding backlash. Facebook, the company, is kind of a soc…

The "don't be evil" moment will be when people really start pulling the plug en masse. I mean the advertisers.

I don't advertise my company with facebook, for this very reason. I'm sure there are other people out there who feel this way. I spend about $1500 a month with Google, because they're trying not to be evil (even if they fail at the attempt sometimes). Not big money, by any means, but if a few thousand companies are opting to not advertise with facebook because they're kinda evil, it could start to be real money.

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#127

Facebook simply doesn't have an ethical central core. They've shown over and over that when user privacy or security conflict with facebook's goals, they'll choose facebook over the user. It's always relatively subtle; they strive to only do what they can get away with...but it's always pushing the line, and is never based on trying to do what's right, merely avoiding backlash. Facebook, the company, is kind of a soc…

Can you elaborate on why you think in this specific case user privacy or security conflict with Facebook's goals?

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#128
post #13
post #11

I've sent several emails to my Facebook email address just for shits and giggles. I've never gotten a single one to go through.

You probably already know this but just to confirm, emails dont show up in messages. Instead they go to 'other' in messages, which no one checks anyways.

Thanks. I didn't know that and wondered where they went.

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#129

Facebook simply doesn't have an ethical central core. They've shown over and over that when user privacy or security conflict with facebook's goals, they'll choose facebook over the user. It's always relatively subtle; they strive to only do what they can get away with...but it's always pushing the line, and is never based on trying to do what's right, merely avoiding backlash. Facebook, the company, is kind of a soc…

Can you elaborate on why you think in this specific case user privacy or security conflict with Facebook's goals?

It seems obvious, to me, but I guess I'll spell it out:

Facebook wants access to your email so badly that they're willing to steal it. This is, in my opinion, among the worst things they've ever done for user privacy (and security, but mostly privacy in this case), in a long list of subtle, and not-so-subtle tactics.

It also has very real security consequences. The automatic contact list updates for potentially millions of users means that sensitive information is likely flowing into facebook servers as we speak, without users knowing it. Passwords, medical information, company secrets, who knows what else? Someone who trusts facebook enough to use it for social interactions might not trust them enough to know about their medical conditions, proprietary company data, passwords for other sites, etc. Facebook took away that privilege for many people with this change.

All that said, here's what's important: This does nothing good for users, and a few bad things. The fact that facebook made this change, knowing that the vast majority of users were not interested in using facebook email thus far, tells us that facebook thinks first of facebook. Even if there were no privacy or security concerns, what the user wants wasn't even in the equation, when facebook did the math on this.

Re: Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost

#130
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd have to show they accepted the email, then chose not to deliver it to the user. I think this is just incompetence. hopefully, it's coupled with a little incontinence.

But the thing is they're not supposed to get the email at all. The user goes into their contact book and selects the person they want to email, and suddenly Facebook is getting the email instead of it being sent to the person's actual email address.

I think Facebook's position on this would be that the user goes into their contact book, selects the @facebook.com email address of the person they want to email, and then Facebook gets the email because it's on their service.
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