Report: Facebook email change alters address books

Facebook's quiet change of the default e-mail addresses on its users' profiles to @facebook.com may have changed their address books and caused them to lose vital messages, a tech site reported Sunday. CNET cited many Facebook users who said the address change, which was done without their consent, resulted in email being redirected, or lost. "When Facebook forced its hundreds of millions of users into an @facebook account, commenters across the Internet talked about alterations that had begun in their contacts and address books outside Facebook – valid e-mail addresses were being changed for @Facebook without people's awareness or consent on their phones and computers," it said. It quoted "very angry user" Adobe employee Rachel Luxemburg, who said a co-worker discovered his contact info for her "had been silently updated to overwrite my work e-mail address with my Facebook e-mail address." "He discovered this only after sending work emails to the wrong address," she said. Worse, she said the emails are not actually in her Facebook messages. "For all I know, I could be missing a lot more emails from friends, colleagues, or family members, and never even know it," she said. Yet, Luxemburg said she had rushed replace the @Facebook e-mail with their correct e-mail address once she found out about Facebook's change. CNET also cited another Facebook user who said on Hacker News that her mother found many of the e-mail addresses in her Droid Razr contacts had been replaced with Facebook ones. "It would seem the Facebook app had been populating her address book with emails and contact photos, and decided to migrate all her Facebook-using contacts over to this convenient new system," CNET quoted the user as saying. Another one on Slashdot complained about an address book full of "bogus e-mail addresses" after syncing a phone with Facebook. CNET noted Apple's new iOS 6 Facebook integration can alter address book entries without any warning. "This is bad news for users that have expectations around e-mail communication by changing their e-mail addresses, intercepting and redirecting their communication elsewhere," CNET said. — LBG, GMA News