facebook.com e-mail plague chokes phone address books

Facebook sync may have changed phone contacts to @facebook.com e-mail address.

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[whisk3rs]

Facewreck.

 

[Leiesoldat]

This has finally broken my patience with FB. I'm deleting my shit when I get home.

Fuck you Facebook.

 

[planetix]

It's shocking that either A) A public company the size of Facebook still lacks the kind of internal checks & balances that would keep dumb decisions like this from seeing the light of day or B) It does have them, and everyone involved thought it was a grand idea.

Neither option says anything good about how that company is run. Sure, you can dislike Facebook personally, or hate their privacy policies, etc, but the fact remains it's a company worth billions that pays top dollar for people who are supposed to be the best in the world at what they do.... but this little fiasco just shot a hole in that theory.

I could easily see this hair-brained scheme coming out of a series of meetings involving a small number of people, but come on, a massive change like this surely should have been run by other groups. How could no one in that entire company anticipate what would happen to Facebook sync, for example?

 

[dbngshm]

Moral of a story that has played out over a thousand times now - why mess around with something that's working fine?

 

[deet]

Crap like this is why I'm uncomfortable even having a Facebook app on my phone.

I think I'm planning not to enable built-in Facebook synchronization when iOS 6 comes out.

With other e-mail+contacts providers like Google, there are avenues of redress in the event of a fuckup like this. With Facebook, you'll never be able to undo the damage, except by hand. No trustworthiness there at all.

Facebook wants all my data locked up in its little garden, but the gate locks both ways. If I can't get out, then they can't come in. They won't be getting access to anything more from me than what's required for me to look at cat pictures in my timeline.

 

[puck0114]

Facepalm

 

[nehinks]

Did anybody else have problems going into their Facebook setting and trying to access that "Contact Information" tab? I went in after reading about the initial issue on Ars, and kept getting errors from Facebook on that tab only. It would pop up a dialog box with error and send me back to the top profile edit page. I don't remember exact wording, but wouldnt let me open it for a several day period. Works now though...

Edit: Also, I noticed a couple interesting things. You can change the xxxx@facebook.com email to hidden instead of the default public option easily enough. However if you try to use the "Add / Remove Emails" it acts like it removed it (makes it gray and puts a line through it), but instead it not only doesn't delete it, they actually reset it to its default state - back to public status. Quite...sneaky.

 

[daggar]

I never let Facebook sync with anything else on my phone, out of a general distrust for the company and a desire to keep it walled off as much as possible. Glad I didn't, but I feel sorry for those who did-- up until now, Facebook seemed like a reasonably stable source of contact information. Who would have expected FB to torpedo their contact lists like this until it happened?

 

[C Boy]

It was bound to happen after the IPO - the MBA's have taken control.

 

[samuraidrive]

Something tells me this is exactly what they wanted - more traffic on their website with a seeming innocuous change.

Bravo, Facebook.

 

[GFKBill]

I take it back, it's more confusing than I thought. My primary email is unchanged, but if I go into my timeline I get a notification about the new @facebook email.

 

[cmattair]

IANAL (even on TV) but some of this would seem actionable.

I would think a user's contract list is legally their 'property' and FB should interpret permission to sync in the most restrictive manner: ie, look but not touch.

 

[daggar]

It was bound to happen after the IPO - the MBA's have taken control.

Nah This scale of this screwup is somewhat surprising, but it's largely in line with FB's other management mistakes. This has all the earmarks of one of Zuckerberg's brilliant ideas.

 

[Sifaka]

Facebook is like a drunk husband that comes home and hits you. You wake up in the morning and say it will be ok, but it never is.

 

[MightyPez]

I never let Facebook sync with anything else on my phone, out of a general distrust for the company and a desire to keep it walled off as much as possible. Glad I didn't, but I feel sorry for those who did-- up until now, Facebook seemed like a reasonably stable source of contact information. Who would have expected FB to torpedo their contact lists like this until it happened?

Indeed. I tried it once back in the day but immediately turned it off when I saw it could mess with my existing contacts.

Here's the thing: I truly believe this is a case where Hanlon's Razor applies. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." They changed the e-mail setting for all users, and those with synced contacts had the setting Facebook changed reflect in their contacts. I don't think Facebook intentionally did this, but rather didn't think about what kind of ramification the e-mail policy would have.

Which isn't excusing the problem. In fact, it makes it all that much worse. The people running Facebook showed no foresight into how a controversial policy change would affect other parts of their users experience. That is just grossly incompetent.

 

[Toleraen]

For those that have been impacted by this...does it change *all* email addresses in the contacts or just the email address for the merged facebook contact? IE will it mess with my Google account contact information as well?

 

[Deleted member 14629]

Yah, this is a giant pain in the ass. I'd gotten lazy with my Facebook integration to my phone, and not kept separate contacts for many friends. Now I have bad addresses for them, and it's the only address I have for them on my phone, unless they fix their profile.

I did it for mine, and mad sure my facebook.com email address was hidden from everyone, but what a pain.

 

[drpfenderson]

It's shocking that either A) A public company the size of Facebook still lacks the kind of internal checks & balances that would keep dumb decisions like this from seeing the light of day or B) It does have them, and everyone involved thought it was a grand idea.

Not too surprising. I'm sure an engineer or UX person came to them and voiced dissent - only to be told to STFU and follow orders. They knew what was going to happen. They didn't care. It's all about controlling your information streams in every way possible. This was just a huge leap in that direction.

What's surprising to me is the type of mistake and the severity of what it affects. As I programmer I have never, ever seen a company knowingly change public-facing user content...much less on this scale. It's pretty much Rule #1 that you do not change data that the user purposefully adds themselves to the service. The only time I've ever heard of a company doing that is for security reasons, or with user permission. Companies make the mistakes that Facebook makes all the time, especially when it comes to privacy. Google Buzz is a great example. But the intentional change of everyone's default contact information to an internal messaging system is something I've only heard of black-hat hackers and malicious programs doing. Communication interception is pretty illegal in most every civilized country.

Not surprising that there are already people gathering for a class-action lawsuit over lost data. Wouldn't be surprised at all to see a senate investigation into this very soon for charges of unlawful communication interception or wiretapping. And that's just in the US. Facebook has already faced major legal heat in many other countries for far less than this.

Here's the thing: I truly believe this is a case where Hanlon's Razor applies. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." They changed the e-mail setting for all users, and those with synced contacts had the setting Facebook changed reflect in their contacts. I don't think Facebook intentionally did this, but rather didn't think about what kind of ramification the e-mail policy would have.

Really? You think of their myriad and intelligent workforce of engineers, programmers, server admins, UX/UI experts, marketing people, customer service reps, etc - NONE of them saw that this would cause a problem? You don't think they did internal testing first, and that none of the people testing this had the Facebook app on their smartphones? I highly doubt it. They knew, and they planned, and they did it according to plan. I'm just guessing they hoped it would blow over faster.

 

[DBlackborough]

On my WP7 phone it just added another address, as far I can see from looking at a few of my contacts, didn't appear to alter any.

 

[thebonafortuna]

This is why I uninstalled Facebook from my phone a long time ago. That, and it never worked well. Its also why Facebook (the app) isn't allowed anywhere near my iPad. FB is like the bad kid in the neighborhood that parents tell their kids to stay away from.

Won't allow it anywhere near my devices when ios6 comes out, either.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

I don't even own a facebook!
But this inspired me to make a Google+ account out of spite. Probably won't use it for anything other than inflating Google's user count, if at all.

 

[Boskone]

And people wonder why I don't use Facebook.

 

[asdf25]

I never let Facebook sync with anything else on my phone, out of a general distrust for the company and a desire to keep it walled off as much as possible. Glad I didn't, but I feel sorry for those who did-- up until now, Facebook seemed like a reasonably stable source of contact information. Who would have expected FB to torpedo their contact lists like this until it happened?

Indeed. I tried it once back in the day but immediately turned it off when I saw it could mess with my existing contacts.

Here's the thing: I truly believe this is a case where Hanlon's Razor applies. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." They changed the e-mail setting for all users, and those with synced contacts had the setting Facebook changed reflect in their contacts. I don't think Facebook intentionally did this, but rather didn't think about what kind of ramification the e-mail policy would have.

Which isn't excusing the problem. In fact, it makes it all that much worse. The people running Facebook showed no foresight into how a controversial policy change would affect other parts of their users experience. That is just grossly incompetent.

Agreed that this was certainly stupidity but facebook has a history of doing stupid/weird/creepy things to users and their data. I agree with daggar I also avoid facebook out of a general mistrust. Not only because of their mistakes but also because they have a history of making things overly complicated. I use the site infrequently enough that I don't trust I understand how to control where things go and who sees them etc and don't want to spend the time learning. So I just avoid it.

 

[MarkMS]

So @facebook email was a bust, FB retaliates by forcing people to have one and even go as far as replacing their default email address on their profile to the new @facebook address? Hmm, seems like a planned feature that Facebook will claim was a "bug". Has FB even acknowledged this as a "bug"?

<conspiracy>FB and their shareholders did this to become a big boy email provider like Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail.</conspiracy>

 

[karolus]

Was this perhaps intentional, or are they inching ever closer to jumping the shark?

Say what one will about Google, but I can't recall them ever having close to the major privacy issues that FB has been having...

 

[rgharakh]

Just a cheap and underhanded attempt to legitimize their awful services.

 

[Just Joe]

Put Carreon on the case!

 

[adityanag]

And this was the straw that broke this camel's back. I deactivated and permanently deleted my FB account.. now in two weeks it *should* disappear.

Of course, knowing Zuck and Co., it'll probably reappear magically in three months. Good thing that I never put any personal information into it anyway.

 

[jackstrop]

And people wonder why I don't use Facebook.

Basically what I was going to say.

What does anyone use it for to start with.

Seems the easiest internet business model is giving vain people of questionable intelligence a platform. From what I can tell that's the only function facebook serves that can't be fulfilled with a mailing list.

 

[fferitt25]

LMAO.

So sad.

 

[Thorzdad]

It's shocking that either A) A public company the size of Facebook still lacks the kind of internal checks & balances that would keep dumb decisions like this from seeing the light of day or B) It does have them, and everyone involved thought it was a grand idea....How could no one in that entire company anticipate what would happen to Facebook sync, for example?

If you have ever had the dubious pleasure of working in a marketing department full of wild-eyed, true-believers, you'd have no problem understanding how stuff like this happens.

Even now, I suspect a great many of FB's marketing droids (and, possibly, quite a few of the dev-bots) stand in disbelief that anyone could possibly have a problem with the awesome opportunity they've given everyone.

 

[Goucham]

Something tells me this is exactly what they wanted - more traffic on their website with a seeming innocuous change.

Bravo, Facebook.

I'm inclined to agree with you. This smacks less of incompetence and more of a calculated move to force the email issue. The loud chatter from the usual tech blogs will prompt one or more apologies but Facebook has pulled enough of these stunts to know that for all the the hue and cry, it won't make a [meaningful] dent in the subscriber base. If nothing else, they know their audience.

 

[Ars of Ares]

Jesus Christ. Final nail. I thought I could ignore all the douchebaggery this company forces on its users, particularly the @facebook.com lameness, but apparently I was wrong. Deletion pending.

 

[piofinn]

<conspiracy>FB and their shareholders did this to become a big boy email provider like Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail.</conspiracy>

Well, yeah… That's actually exactly what they are trying to do. Of course they fail big time and decide to take the market by force, which obviously won't work and makes for pissed-off users.

Not conspiracy, but idiocy.

 

[coalminds]

So people kept syncing FB to their phones even after it was uploading phone numbers from their phone to their FB "phonebook" without permission?

 

[Ghentalicious]

Facebook is like a drunk husband that comes home and hits you. You wake up in the morning and say it will be ok, but it never is.

Wow. This is a perfect description. Being 0% sarcastic. +1

 

[thekaj]

but the fact remains it's a company worth billions that pays top dollar for people who are supposed to be the best in the world at what they do.... but this little fiasco just shot a hole in that theory.

Well that's the thing. They probably do have people who are best in the world at what they specifically do. That doesn't mean that they have the experience and or maturity to make good decisions. I do wonder if this will encourage questions from investors as to how great of an idea it is to have a 28 year old as CEO. It's the whole reason why a lot of successful start-ups tend to bring on more experienced executive officers to run the business once they get big. Youthful exuberance is great when you're a feisty young company clawing your way to the top. Not so much when you've got 900 million users, many of which are naive enough to trust you with their personal contacts.

 

[NicoleC]

Edit: Also, I noticed a couple interesting things. You can change the xxxx@facebook.com email to hidden instead of the default public option easily enough. However if you try to use the "Add / Remove Emails" it acts like it removed it (makes it gray and puts a line through it), but instead it not only doesn't delete it, they actually reset it to its default state - back to public status. Quite...sneaky.

I heard about trouble with early versions, but when I went to change mine it didn't even give the option to delete the FB one. You can't -- period. Hide it, yes, delete, no.

So in addition to the stupidity of the whole thing, makes me think this was not just poorly thought out, but some pointy haired boss insisted his bright idea happen NOW. It certainly did not go through normal testing. FB has bugs, but considering the size and scale of the app, there are very, very few of them. Their test team does a good job normally.

 

[getoffthis]

You guys still GOOFing (getting goofed) with Facebook? How many times are we going to have to listen to your complaint?. Nothing has changed. Get used to it or move on.