This time the social networking giant has decided to make their “Facebook” emails the default ones for contact on all Timeline and older profiles. This was started back in April and done without any notification to users of the service. Any address that you might have had as your default for contacting you has now been changed to a @facebook.com address. This move is exceptionally underhanded on the part of Facebook and can be seen as a method for high jacking communication meant for you by the service.  Especially considering that you cannot remove the Facebook assigned email at all! You can only hide it from your Timeline and put back the one you wanted.

In fact, as Gervase Markham has said on his Blog Hacking for Christ, it is little more than a Man in the Middle attack at this point. We wonder if Facebook can be prosecuted for this (we highly doubt it, but we are sure that there will be lawsuits over this).

"In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?"

Facebook, on the other hand, is trying to say that this happened as they were rolling out improvements to their Timeline feature. To us this sounds like an outright fabrication as if they were only rolling out an improvement, why change my default contact email to Facebook? This really just appears to be another attempt by Facebook to push more users to stay with their service. Unfortunately it is one that has already received a ton of bad press and is sure to receive more as many are wondering what other settings Facebook may be adjusting for their users in the name of “improvements”

I know that Facebook is huge and people love to use the service for everything from keeping in touch with friends to fulfilling their own exhibitionists needs, but eventually Facebook will push too far with the license they take for forcing changes on their users. They are already coming off of a $20 million loss for using people’s likeness in sponsored stories and have a few other legal worries on top of that. You would think they would learn not to do this stuff and maybe cut it out before people start to leave the site due to their abuses.

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