Facebook is Their Own Worst Enemy – Tech Tuesday

The big story yesterday and will most likely be for another 24 hours or so, is Facebook's announced, yet unannounced changing of everyone of their users email address on their profile to an @facebook.com email address. Once this was noticed by media and the people, "stuff" started to hit the fan.

So what is the big deal about this some of you may think? For one, it's not really like email. Yes it combines your Facebook messenger chats, as well as being able to to do SMS and email in to one big group. But that's all it does. All your conversations with someone are just "lumped" together. What can be troubling to me and others is that Facebook could scan emails sent to you or that you send using this facebook.com email address. This is known by security people as a Man in the Middle Attack. There is also the fact that facebook is famous for making changes to their service and not letting people know about said change or even letting them opt out of the change before hand.

While Facebook did announce this new service back in 2010, nothing really happened with it. It was just like everyone forgot it. Then two years later, they changed everything but neglected to send a reminder. When they were asked by some news outlets, NPR being one of them, about the changes, they really didn't give a straight answer.

When I saw the news I of course checked mine and changed it back and started to take info out of my profile. I may even just start putting nonsense in there to screw up their info gathering. Facebook has been doing this kind of thing over, and over again. Zuckerberg's vision of the future is that there is no privacy. Everything and I mean everything should be open. Thanks Mark, but no thanks. As a publicly traded company, I don't see this helping their bottom line at all.

Some advice I would give Facebook about this, and this is totally my advice as a user and some who kind of works in the media, is that they may want to hire someone else to do their public relations, as whoever it is now, is not speaking up at meetings like the one for this change and saying, "Hey, we announced this two years ago. We really should send out a reminder to everyone and let them know this is coming." Yeah, that would be good.

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