Facebook Email Change Shows Company Will Throw Privacy Out the Window for Profit

The empire strikes again! Facebook has found a new way to create massive disapproval by switching out users' personal email addresses for Facebook email addresses. How can this sleazy move get any worse? They didn’t tell their users about it. This move seems like an invasion of privacy, and it has many worried about what other dastardly moves may be next from Facebook.

Although Facebook claims that they let users know in April about the creation of (at) facebook.com email addresses, they did not tell their 900 million users that they would also be switching their personal address on their profiles. According to Facebook, this move is to help make details “more consistent” on the website. Smooth, Facebook, very smooth. 

This desperate attempt to vamp up their own mail users against Google, Yahoo, and other email providers is in vain. Facebook first released their email in 2010, and since then, we have all avoided it like the plague. Users do not want to use Facebook email as a primary email account. With all the privacy setting uproars that Facebook has created in the past few years, the smart choice seems to be to not mix information sensitive things like emails, with recreational outlets like Facebook. 

That said, this isn’t the worst that Facebook has done. Just look at their history of changes to user profiles, and how angry it made users. In 2006, the news feed was introduced, and all of our friends could see our most recent activities right on their homepage. Many were upset about this, and that they could not opt out of this feature. Next, they introduced timeline, which shows your activity chronologically from birth directly on your profile. This makes it easier for people to search through information from the past that would have been more difficult to find in the past. In both of these instances, users cried out against Facebook, and demanded for the changes to be reversed. Facebook relentlessly carried on with building up an empire, and we all carried on with updating our statuses, and tagging photos of our weekends. 

Facebook changed your email address on your profile. It would be naïve of any user to think that this will be the last time they push the boundaries of what they can change on users. As long as we continue to feed and nurture Facebook, it will continue to sit on the throne of social media.