Facebook iz in yor profile redirecting your emailz

I caught a tweet a little while ago, retweeted by @WolfsonLiterary

So I go check out the website, and given how many times there have been scam email campaigns trying to fool people into thinking their Facebook username etc have been changed to get you to visit a fake site, check Google.

I discovered, to my extreme annoyance, that it appears to be true – my email address on my Timelines page had been changed, without me getting any warning or being asked to do it.

I’ve checked a few friends’ pages as well, and they’ve got the same shift of their “primary” email to @facebook.com

It looks like, right now, it only affects users who have been forced to use Timelines, and is being done incrementally as well – I guess Facebook hoped no-one would notice before it was fait accomplit.

Thankfully the fix is simple – go to your Timelines page, click About to see if your email address listed has been hijacked to point to <your username>@facebook.com, and if it has click the “Edit” button on your About box.  Facebook didn’t delete your existing email address(es), they just set them all to be hidden, and added the @facebook.com one and set that to be visible.  Just change the preferences to unhide your original email address(es) and hide the @facebook.com one if you want to – it only redirects to your Facebook messages inbox anyways.

This is yet another straw pushing me to just dump using Facebook. The only reason I’m still there is because of 2 groups I participate in, but at this rate not even that’s going to keep me using the nanny state of the internet.

Edit: I’m wondering if this is related to this article 2 months ago Zemanta dug out: Facebook plans to sync user email with Timeline (digitaltrends.com)

If it is, then I guess the same people that rolled out their hideously over-hyped IPO decided to roll out this hideously under-hyped profile hijack.

More Reading:

Facebook just changed your email address without asking – here’s how to fix it (Gizmodo.com)

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