A while back we told you about Facebook switching your email address on your timelines to your Facebook email address. You had to go back and change it. Hassle. Self-serving on Facebook’s part. Ick. Turns out the problems go deeper than that. Facebook is now promising to fix it, which is okay, I guess, but not as good as not screwing up in the first place.
Seems some Facebook users who accessed the service via mobile devices had their address books plumbed.
The software was designed to copy over its users’ “primary email addresses” – the ones they used to log into the social network.
However, a statement acknowledged that “for people on certain devices, a bug meant that the device was pulling the last email address added to the account rather than the primary address, resulting in @facebook.com addresses being pulled”.
Since Facebook’s synchronisation tool only synchronised email addresses that were visible on its site, and it had made third-party addresses invisible by default, pre-existing contacts were deleted as a result.
Facebook is in your phone! And deleting your contacts! Unlike!
It’s terribly difficult know when people are finally going to get annoyed with Facebook’s intrusions into privacy and the ways that we like to connect with each other. For many commenters that point was reached a long time ago but that doesn’t seem to stop people actually using the site.
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