Facebook reported @facebook.com email service development in November of 2010; however, the social networking site did not warn its users about the changes that were made in the end of June of 2012, and now all 900 million of Facebook’s users are being forced to expose their email accounts without any of their approval or authorization.
Since Facebook’s Timeline was presented to the masses in the end of last year, the company has injected various developments and changes, all of which were forced on website’s users. Some of them were already needed, and new privacy policies should be applauded. Overall, Facebook is known to advocate for website users’ privacy; however, now the company decided to act against it, by forcing @facebook.com email accounts on everybody. Even though the service has not reached all company’s users yet, all of them are meant to find Facebook’s email set as their default email address in the Contact information area at one point or another.
Many Facebook’s users might be completely unaware of the change for days or even months, as no notification messages or official announcements have been present on the company’s behalf. According to eweek.com, Facebook representatives stay defensive, stating that the change was not supposed to force anything on the masses; however, it might be too late for the apologies, as Facebook community forums are getting filled with resentment messages from users, who feel betrayed by the company. And this virtual outrage is now being justified by Internet security experts like Sophos, who claim that Facebook could potentially be opening backdoors for spamming and hacking attacks, targeted against many of @facebook.com accounts.
This Facebook’s action is a clear attempt to attract more people to use @facebook.com email services, and even though it may seem to have been done in a tremendously incorrect way, all users can change their default email addresses. This can be done via Contact Info section, where “Hidden from Timeline” settings can be chosen. Unfortunately, this will not protect againts schemers, who will not need much effort to discover addresses of Facebook’s email accounts, since they now coincide with the public usernames, which can be found in the URLs of personal profile pages. This means that spammers could easily attack all 900 million of Facebook email accounts, and there is no information whether the email domain has any antimalware filters; therefore, there is no guarantee that cyber criminals will not manage to employ the source for malignant intentions.