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'.....

Why the Facebook IPO affects gaming

You have probably already noticed, if you play games on Facebook, that one of the key social aspects, that of gifting has been having a few problems recently. You may even have noticed that some games have begun to remove gifting altogether. You may, if you are of a certain mindset have begun to wonder why this is happening. Well, the reason goes back to the analyst reports that came out as part of the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of Facebook. Hidden away amongst the hype and the questions over value and the uncertainty over marketing revenue were reports on that other significant revenue stream, the money that game players pay to game producers in order to gain an advantage within the game, paying to buy hard to find items or rare boosts. Now, of course, it is perfectly possible to play most Facebook games without paying anything at all, but where is the fun in that? Game producers know perfectly well that people are naturally competitive and the revenue generated by people seeking an advantage has always been good. Of course Facebook has always taken a share of the revenue, and at the time of the IPO it was running at something like $1.9 billion dollars a year, which is not to be sniffed at.

Of course, in the world of public corporations, and the drive for returns on investment and keeping shareholders and more importantly, bankers, happy, this is an opportunity. Imagine if all those gifts that your friends send you every day, all those little helping hands were suddenly removed? What if you could still get them in the game, but the time taken to do that was rather high? Wouldn't you be tempted to maybe speed the process up a little? Maybe invest a little of your hard earned cash to make up the missing help from friends? It might even tempt you if you have never even considered paying for your gaming before, especially if the cost wasn't all that high. Of course, if that was the case, Facebook, and therefore Facebook investors would get a nice little boost in revenue for very little effort. Isn't that nice! Of course, it could just be coincidence, but add to this the previous change in the way people pay for game credits. Remember when you bought the game credits directly from the game producer? There wasn't much of an announcement but suddenly about six months ago you stated to buy Facebook credits that were then converted into game credits for your specific game of choice. This quite nicely allows Facebook far more control over spending on the site, and it is of course only coincidental that there is always a discrepancy in exchange rates between facebook credits and game credits.

What can we expect next from the newly corporate social networking site that we all love? Well, facebook is still saying that it will always be free and that might well be the case, but what about subscription gaming? The model is already in place, World of Warcraft being the obvious example, but would social gamers stand for this? It is interesting to note how many people become addicted to games on facebook. Far more so than in other environments, and this will make it far harder for people to throw away all that gaming enjoyment if the subscription is not too high. We will have to see where things go on this one, but don't be surprised if the cost of your enjoyment of gaming on facebook slowly starts to creep up. But hey, it's only money.....