Much Less Much More

peterfeld:

The corporate sociopaths who run Facebook have gotten ever more sketch in their desperate attempt to drive traffic to their sinking ship - as time spent on the site by US users continues to drop. Latest ploy: force users to start using their @facebook.com email addresses.

1. Last week it was reported that FB had changed all users’ display email addresses on their profile pages (or timeline) to @facebook.com. Users scrambled to fix the change - at least those who were aware. (FB preys on the inattentiveness of its vast bulk of un-tech savvy users.)

2. Now it’s been reported by CNET that FB has overwritten email addresses in the phone contacts of iPhone users who sync with Facebook, changing them to @facebook.com.

3. As a result, important messages (employee to boss, for example) are never received, rerouted through Facebook.

4. To make things worse, as was reported last year, Facebook routes messages from your non-FB friends into a little-known “other” tab, which you would not see unless you clicked on the messages tab. (See above.) A Slate reporter complained bitterly after messages from someone attempting to return her lost laptop were hidden in that “other” folder, where she never saw them. Her article prompted readers to explore their own “other” folder, where many of them discovered important missed messages (e.g., invitations to visit relatives while traveling). Facebook has done nothing to address this.

5. Putting it together: many of the Facebook-hijacked emails went, not into the recipients’ main Facebook inbox, but into “other.”

6. Facebook’s response: users are “confused.”

Facebook is simply a dreadful, awful company. There are a few steps you can take short of deleting or deactivating your account - the first obvious one is to remove Facebook from your phone. (Not a bad idea anyway, since it reads the rest of your non-FB contacts and monitors everything you do with your device.) 

I’ve taken more extreme steps - minimizing my activity on Facebook altogether, no longer posting photos or status updates (except necessary business promotion) and avoiding “liking” any brands. (You can unlike the ones you already have.) 

My most extreme step - recommended since FB tracks all your web browsing - is to quarantine Facebook, meaning that I use Safari for Facebook and nothing else, and never use Facebook from Chrome (my primary browser).

Starve the Facebook beast!

I definitely just went on Facebook to look and see if any “important” messages had been shuffled into that “Other” folder. And of course there were two two-month-old messages from people expressing interest in looking for an apartment in Cambridge with me, from when I posted a message on my grad school incoming student Facebook page asking if anyone was looking for a roommate. That would have been handy information, considering I’m still looking for an apartment and am kind of locked into a group I fell into by serendipity and happenstance. I’ll see Facebook in hell.

(via brianvan)