Facebook and the case of e-mail address changes

Part of the ongoing series of articles of how Facebook is changing post IPO we have news coming out of account details being changed automatically without users permissions. It should be noted that when you sign up for Facebook you pretty much give away any rights you have in the terms and conditions, but one of the few things you do retain is the right to display your personal contact details, such as your e-mail address. Beginning last week and rolling out over the weekend many users started to see their public contact e-mail address being changed to a facebook one. This comes after a marketing campaign by Facebook to encourage users to take a facebook address was largely ignored, so they decided to do it anyway. The way this works is that you are allocated a facebook email address when you register with the site automatically. Any e-mails sent to you on your own e-mail address come to you directly but anything sent to your FB address are routed through FB's servers before being forwarded to your registered address.

Lets think about why this might be useful, and who might benefit. Firstly there is the marketing angle. One of the biggest issued raised in the FB IPO was that the value of the site as a marketing tool was a unknown, but it everyone has a standardised email address format, reaching people becomes much easier, as does monitoring how successful a marketing campaign is. This increases the value of FB to corporate businesses. This is just a start though. If, as suspected the IPO was part of an ongoing monitoring strategy by the CIA then having messages sent outside the site monitored alongside intra site communications has big advantages. We already know that all of our on site activity is monitored and recorded, and that accounts are accessed and utilised by intelligence communities to supplement other data sources, so this is just another step in that process. It also allows far easier hacking of personal email addresses because in the process of forwarding messages from the FB email to the personal email there is an opportunity to monitor the personal email account by adding extra script in the forwarded mail.

So, what can you do to limit the danger that this places you in? Make sure that you use a seperate email account to register on Facebook. Make sure you only use that account for Facebook activity. Don't register a phone number to the account as if you use a smartphone and collect e-mails from multiple accounts on it they all become vulnerable. Use a different password on FB than on anything else, and above all be careful what you view and who you are friends with. When you consider, as discussed in a previous article that you are considered a “person of interest” to US intelligence if you grow your own food, or like to go camping, or are affiliated with scout groups, churches, community groups and similar, before you even start looking at political and social groups you begin to understand the scale of the problem. You know that George Takei cartoon you just clicked “like” on? Well guess what? That put you on a watch list. That friend of yours who posts about hemp? Yup, same result. Taken in isolation, these subtle changes to Facebook and the way it operates might be coincidence, but the reactivation of dead accounts, the change to e-mails, the change in the way groups are categorised and the changes coming through to the way gaming operates all add up to one thing. Trouble for users, many of whom are going to have a hard time breaking away from Facebooks addictive clutches. Be careful out there friends, the times they are a changin'.....