Facebook changes your e-mail ID without asking you

Facebook is an extremely popular phenomenon and they have a bunch of services, one of which is the free e-mail service. The e-mail service that was launched back in late 2010 was enabled, but it hasn’t caught on just yet. Gmail is currently the most popular service of the lot. Facebook now has gone ahead and done something that many would disapprove of. They’ve enabled the Facebook e-mail address in your personal information page, making it public without your knowledge. While this might not seem like a great deal, it does open up your e-mail address, exposing it to spammers. This means that anyone who has access to your information page will be able to see your e-mail address. Most users expect a service to notify them before making such a move and Facebook hasn’t.

Fortunately, there’s a way to disable the e-mail address from showing up on your page. All you need to do is go to your own About page and click on the Edit button on the Contact Info section. By default you’ll find that the Facebook ID that you had is marked as Visible to timeline. Now, choose to hide it. This will stop your e-mail address from showing up on the timeline. Of course, you also have the option of choosing to show the e-mail address to just your friends or close ones, using the lists feature present on Facebook. 

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Taking matters into their own hands

The reactions from the web are justified while most others aren’t. Sure, it might appear silly that Facebook would make a move like this, without notifying users and they should have. On the other hand, there’s no point in worrying about a Facebook e-mail address which you aren’t going to be using. All mails that you receive on the Facebook ID but not from a Facebook ID end up in a different folder altogether, so it won’t necessarily clog your inbox. 

Facebook hasn’t been the most rigid company around and it’s obvious by the recent development where they said that they would let their users vote on policies. The company made an addition to its privacy policies that it will be handing over some decision making control to the users. Facebook’s privacy policies have regularly been questioned and sometimes amended. In fact, in order to make users understand all of Facebook’s policies a little easily, the social network also recently launched a Policies page where they gathered all their policies into one place. The main idea behind the page is “Everything you need to know in one place”.

Facebook’s Timeline feature also has been of some concern to users. The Timeline feature presents your entire Facebook history, as well as any personal history you choose to put in, in a chronological order. However, according to a study done by IT security and data protection firm, Sophos, 51 percent of Facebook users are concerned about the Timeline feature. Sophos, in its study found that there are concerns that the additional information that other users have access to and the greater ease to access user information will make it easier for identity thieves and stalkers to get information, which they can then abuse. The recent move to change e-mail addresses randomly without notifying users isn’t going to help much either.