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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

#171

Post by MiguelHudnandez »

ams6110 wrote: post #164
SwellJoe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said nothing about password reset emails. I come from an IT background. I can't even count the number of times I've sent temporary passwords over email to co-workers, customers, etc., including from my phone. If something can be sent via email, it will be, and when the numbers are in the millions...there's a lot of data that people consider private.

Maybe a phone call to communicate a password would be better. Not as convenient of course, but security and convenience don't often go together. That assumes your voice provider isn't recording the call.

Frustrated voice fades in, "Right, capital L. No, slash, not backslash. The one that's leaning to the right. Bottom-left to top-right. By the shift key. On your phone? I'm not sure where it is on your phone's keyboard. Ohh, you got it? Ok, the rest is lowercase..."

Sometimes an email or text is better for everyone. But I always split up the info between two bands. Most info in an email and a SMS for the password. Or just have them change it after they log in.

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

#172

Post by FuzzyDunlop »

spinchange wrote: post #118

Losing emails and user dissatisfaction is just a bug. Making their email addy the primary specifically to seed everyone's contacts with it via sync-enabled apps was the feature.

Behaviour awfully similar to that of a virus, or malware.

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

#173

Post by MBCook »

raganwald wrote: post #114
MBCook wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS 5 doesn't have FB integration, so it couldn't happen directly. I don't know if the FB app can write to your contacts (although it can read them, which caused that dust up earlier in the year). That's where the danger might be for iOS 5 users.

The FB app can update your contact photos when your FB friends update their profile pics, I actually like that feature, it’s fun and relatively harmless.

I didn't know that (I don't log into FB much), that's actually kinda neat. That would be a great way to keep photos for everyone.

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

#174

Post by chrischen »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #169
chrischen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works on facebook because no one uses facebook for anything important. But messing with iOS contacts... that's reaching out and breaking things that aren't on facebook.

Define important. It's become my de facto social calendar, and it's how I communicate online with most people that aren't geographically close to me. (I'm honestly not even sure I even have their email addresses, especially not since this fiasco.)

Yea I communicate with my friends through facebook. That's one way to do it. My communications with friends aren't important compared to something like email which I use with investors or for business. However facebook drops messages often enough that I wouldn't use it for important stuff even if I wanted to.

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

#175

Post by accountswu »

This is why I never upload my pictures or videos on facebook and I have my home town and current city are set to Valhalla and Atlantis.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/15/facebook-lie-terms-of-servi... "Mr. Schnitt suggests that users are free to lie about their hometown or take down their profile picture to protect their privacy..."

The clarification from Barry Schnitt (Facebook’s Director of Corporate Communications and Public Policy) was even worse:

"I think WSJ is paraphrasing. What I said is profile picture and current city are optional. You don’t have to include a profile picture or you can include a picture of your dog or anything you like. Similarly, you don’t have to indicate your current city or you can indicate that your current city is “Atlantis”, “Valhalla” or, again, anything you like. We hope people will use accurate information if they are comfortable doing so because that information helps them to be found by their friends, which is part of the point of joining the site."

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

#176

Post by brown9-2 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #129
orijing wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 milli…

Why would that sensitive information start flowing to people's @facebook.com email addresses automatically when Facebook changed the email address shown on the site?

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

#177

Post by bogger »

Quite apart from the ethical ins and outs of this, it's simply a buggy release.

I played around with my new (and unwanted) email address and found the following:

1. Email sent to the new facebook address from the gmail account associated with my profile gets delivered to my facebook messages.

2. Email sent to the new facebook address from another gmail account I own is not delivered. It simply disappears.

This is basic stuff. I guess they did like no testing before they released this f*up to their billion or so users.

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

#178

Post by SwellJoe »

brown9-2 wrote: post #176
SwellJoe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 milli…

Why would that sensitive information start flowing to people's @facebook.com email addresses automatically when Facebook changed the email address shown on the site?

Have you read the article? Because some people's contact lists were updated at the same time, because they were synced with facebook.

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

#180

Post by MrBlue »

gee_totes wrote: post #37
ozataman wrote: post #4

Well, this is my gripe with their "go fast and break things" mantra. It works as long as you have such a highly desirable product that your users just don't care if you're doing everything right. (Or maybe you're in a non-mission-critical business, or better yet, your customers are a bunch of kids!) I'm all for going fast and sincerely believe in "A sense of urgency", but Facebook is really lucky they're not serving…

Facebook is serving shareholders now. I'm hoping there are some serious repercussions internally at FB for this, because as a shareholder, I'm pissed they messed this up because the user base is upset and will continue to stop trusting Facebook. How's the stock supposed to get back to 38 now?

"...because as a shareholder..."

A couple quick questions:

1. How much did you buy in at? 2. WHY on Earth did you buy?

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