Facebook irritates users, again

27 Jun 2012

NEWSWATCH: Facebook has again upset its users with an email address move, reports IOL and Thinus Ferreira, writing on Channel24, comments on a report that indicates that selling channels on a "so-called a la carte" basis would destroy the pay-TV industry.

For more:

IOL: Facebook users irate after email move... It's gone and replaced users' personal Yahoo.com, Gmail.com and other addresses on the users' profile pages with @facebook.com addresses. Not everyone is overjoyed at the move, on the contrary, many are apparently seriously miffed.
Channel24: Report: Separate channels will end pay TV... Thinus Ferreira, an independent TV critic, writer and journalist covering South Africa's TV industry, comments on a report that shows that interfering in the way the pay-TV industry operates in how it sells its channels would very likely leave us without any pay-TV industry at all.
That means that in a country already beset by high unemployment levels, there would be even more people out of work.

From an AFP report via I-Net Bridge...

Facebook email switch prompts outcry

SAN FRANCISCO, US: Facebook users were venting anger over a move changing users' default email address to the one operated by the leading social network.

"You can thank Facebook for making that change without telling you," said security consultant Graham Cluley of Sophos. Facebook indicated in April it would be "updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site."

Bloggers began noticing over the weekend that their contact information had been changed in what some called a "Gmail Killer." "Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?" said Gervase Markham on his blog, "Hacking for Christ."

Cluley said on his blog, "The social network didn't make clear that it would also be making the @facebook.com email addresses the default address displayed to your online friends.

"Clearly this all part of the site's plan to get more people using the @facebook.com email addresses, thus making the social network even harder to extricate yourself from." The moved coincided with a decision by Facebook to postpone a feature called Find Friends Nearby, a location service that identifies other Facebook users in the vicinity.

Facebook, which has more than 900 million users worldwide, has been criticised in the past for changes, especially on privacy settings. The email shift appeared aimed at getting users to remain within the Facebook ecosystem, where they can be hit with targeted advertising, instead of moving to rival services from Google, Yahoo! and others.

Facebook users can restore their original e-mail addresses by editing their profiles.

Source: AFP via I-Net Bridge

Source: I-Net Bridge

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