Facebook is expanding its network to reach out to more people and slowly entering the verticals which it doesn’t have much experience about, First it was the Video chat offering, then the Mobile app, the Facebook phone and now the social network wants to dominate with its own domain email address over the other third-party email addresses.
The social-networking site has replaced your default email addresses such as Gmail and Yahoo! mentioned by you on your Facebook profile with @Facebook.com address, an email service option the company launched a few years ago and synced with Timeline in April.
For many of you, this update might have gone unnoticed. Facebook is apparently trying to increase usage of @facebook.com email addresses and wants to make them consistent across the site, says the social network in its defense.
So the email addresses that you listed earlier as your point of contact are now hidden in the site’s database and your assigned @Facebook.com address is highlighted for friends to see and directs them to your Facebook Messages Inbox. This will make it harder for friends to contact you via third-party email unless you reset your controls. Facebook is clearly trying to boost awareness of its proprietary email addresses that hardly anyone use.
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Facebook should re-consider the move or at least send some strong notification of the changes so that 900 million people don’t suddenly find disconnected with the new email addresses.
It’s not a welcoming action to lock down the visibility of personal addresses by defaulting them to “hidden”.
The purpose creating a big deal out of this news is that millions of people might expect their friends to be able to contact them through their Gmail or other personal email address from their profile, because well, that’s how they set it up. It’s irresponsible of Facebook to modify these settings without telling people.
Because if you purposefully make something visible to friends, you don’t want it to suddenly disappear without warning.
How to undo the settings
To undo the damage and revert back to show the email address you had provided before, visit your profile and click the “About” link on the right side below your cover. Go to the bottom right click “Edit” in the Contact Info section, and in the top right toggle “Hidden from Timeline” to “Shown on Timeline” for all your personal email addresses (and hide your @facebook.com address if you don’t want emails coming to your Messages inbox).
As before, you can also adjust the privacy control for each address for whomever you’d like to see it, like setting a personal address visible only to friends, but a work address visible to friends of friends or public.
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