Earlier today Facebook rolled out another change that seems to be an attempt to improve your privacy by hiding the email address that you have put on your About page. In its place, Facebook has put in your Facebook email address instead. Did you know you have a Facebook email address? No? Well, you do. Everybody who uses Facebook has one. Your Facebook address is your Facebook name @Facebook.com. Some people don’t mind this, but a lot of people don’t like it. Why? Because they’d rather use their own email addresses instead of the one provided by Facebook.
Facebook’s privacy settings can be seen as very complicated for some people. Fact of the matter is, it’s actually pretty simple but very tedious. Facebook allows its members to set pretty much every item of information to be visible or not visible to certain people. You can have a public profile but hide certain information to particular groups of contacts, or hide them from everyone else entirely. You can hide a group of information or just particular items of that group.
Starting today, whether you like it or not, Facebook has replaced your email address that is displayed on your profile with your Facebook address instead regardless of your privacy setting.
This means that if anyone wants to contact you and sees your information on Facebook, they will see your Facebook address instead of the address you want them to know. So where do you check your Facebook email? In your Inbox.
Honestly this actually makes things pretty easy. With Facebook Messenger app available for most smartphone platforms and the Facebook app always displaying the number of unseen notifications, this is probably better than email.
Thing is, people just aren’t used to being contacted this way by strangers or long forgotten friends or maybe just uncomfortable with this idea. Oh, and the fact that most of Facebook’s more than 900 million members aren’t aware that they have an @facebook.com email address. When did Facebook begin handing out these addresses? Back in November 2010.
What Facebook did today was essentially pushing the relevance of the @facebook email and forcing its members to use Facebook’s preferred method of messaging. If you don’t like it and want to change it back to your preferred email address, here’s how:
- Go to your Facebook profile and click on Update Info.
- Scroll down and click Edit on Contact Info
- Change your email address to show on timeline
- Change your Facebook address to hidden
- And you’re done.
