Facebook Responds To Email ‘Hijack’ Claims
The social network site is facing a rebellion by users after it replaced personal emails with its own service on profiles.
Facebook has caused fury among some users with a profile change.
How to Fix Your Facebook Profile
Updated: 11:37am UK, Wednesday 27 June 2012
Anyone who wants to remove Facebook’s email from their profile should follow these simple steps.
– Go to the “About” section of your profile.
In the “contact info” section, click “edit”.
– Hover over your facebook.com email and click “hidden from timeline”.
– Hover over your preferred email and click “shown on timeline”.
– Click “save” at the bottom of the window.
The social networking giant has removed personal email addresses displayed for its 900 million users and replaced them with @facebook.com ones.
Although the company says it announced the changes in April, angry users claimed they had not been consulted in this regard.
Hundreds of users have taken to the web to complain, and more than 600 people signing up to a Facebook protest group called “Leave my email alone Facebook” in 12 hours.
Facebook users then decided to use rival social network platform as Tweeter to discuss the tips on how to reset their emails.
Facebook said it has been rolling out the change to make user details more “consistent” across the site.
The company first started offering its email service in 2010 but many users preferred to keep existing personal addresses as their primary account.
Why would Facebook want to create a unique email address for each and every user. Many users would rather use their own personal address so they can have control over their personal information as suppose to give access to facebook.
However, this might cause Facebook to have more traffic to their website but they already have over 900 million users. So they are only thinking how to make more money as supposed to keep user identity safe. However I don’t think by using a facebook email address would be secure and safe.
Facebook will know all your contacts and friends and will be able to read and colect any user data.
Encouraging more people to use the @facebook.com address could boost profits by driving more traffic and advertising sales towards the site.
He said: “It reeks of the same move Google did with its Buzz product when it automatically opted people in, and users recoiled against the action.
“This is a direction Facebook needs to move in – your email is a proxy for your identity on the internet and Facebook want to usurp people’s pre-existing email identities with their own to help drive up traffic to its site and lock users into its service.
Lots of users are already locked into using Facebook on a daily basis and the internet has already introduced optimised advertisement along side your online activity. So I do not understand how that will help anybody apart from Facebook directly.
That is why web hosting has become more afordable so you can buy your own domain as supposed to @facebook.com.
In my personal opinion it has more power if you have your organisation at your own domain. It means more than having corespondence from an address like @yahoo.com or @facebook.com.
“The problem is the lack of transparency – it has acted without asking for members’ permission first.”
However, Facebook has a consistent service of socialisation and they should focus on their socialisation to become a bigger platform. As suppose to worry on April they’ve been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across their site.
“In addition to everyone receiving an address, we’re also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their timelines.
“Ever since the launch of timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own timelines, and we’re extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address.
“We are providing every Facebook user with his or her own Facebook email address because we find that many users find it useful to connect with each other, but using the Facebook email is completely up to you.”