Facebook complicates privacy settings and hide users’ email addresses, favoring its own messaging platform

Facebook appears to have hidden users’ third-party email addresses from Timeline, but left users’ Facebook.com addresses visible. It has also added a confusing new setting to the email portion of a user’s contact info.

Although users can choose which of their email addresses are displayed on Timeline and change the privacy setting for each address, it is odd Facebook has hidden addresses that users had previously indicated they wanted to share with friends or the public. This seems like a deliberate move to promote its own messaging service over others, but instead of changing users’ privacy settings to do it, the social network simply added a second setting.

In addition to being able to manage the privacy setting of each email address they have connected to their accounts, users now have another setting to control whether to “show” or “hide” that account on Timeline. This makes it difficult for users to understand which addresses they are sharing. As seen in the example below, the privacy setting for the Yahoo account is “friends,” as it has been for years. The Facebook.com address is set to “only me,” as indicated by the lock icon. But when Facebook added the second setting to the right, it defaulted all non-Facebook.com accounts to “hidden from Timeline” and left Facebook.com accounts as “shown on Timeline.” The social network does honor the “only me” setting so the Facebook.com address is not visible to anyone it wasn’t intended for, but it makes the user experience quite unclear.

In April, Facebook made a vague announcement about “updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site.” It did not say that it would hide users’ non-Facebook.com addresses. It simply said, “Now, the address people use to get to your Timeline and send you email on Facebook will be the same.” However, users’ Facebook email addresses had always used the same address as their personalized URLs, so this did not seem to be news at the time.

Now Facebook is referencing this press release to suggest that it did, in fact, let users know that it would be making a change to how email addresses appear on Timeline. It provided us and other news outlets with the following statement:

“As we announced back in April, we’ve been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site. In addition to everyone receiving an address, we’re also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their Timelines. Ever since the launch of Timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own Timelines, and today we’re extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address.”

However, the ability to decide which email address to show or hide on a user’s profile predates Timeline. Users have been able to do this since as early as 2010. What’s new is the confusing second setting we discussed above. Further, we’ve heard from users that this setting has been live for them since last Monday, if not earlier.

Facebook is most often criticized for revealing too much of user’s information, not for hiding it. But when it comes to email, things get complicated for the social network. In 2010, Facebook and Google were involved in a public dispute over the issue of how email contacts should be used. Facebook would not allow users to export their friends’ email addresses, but it helped Gmail users manually download their Gmail contacts and then re-upload them to the social network. Facebook also allowed users to import their friends’ e-mail addresses when they were using Microsoft or Yahoo services.

We wonder whether Facebook’s latest change to hide email addresses is more than just a way to promote its own messaging feature over third-party email services, and if it could be related to preventing contact importing and exporting. A Facebook spokesperson could not comment on this issue.

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Facebook unveils school-specific groups, allows file sharing among users with designated .edu email addresses

Facebook announced a new groups for schools feature that enables users with active school email addresses join online communities related to their college or university.

Groups for schools differ from Facebook’s other groups in that they can be exclusive to students and that members can share documents with each other. The company seems to position these groups as a utility for coordinating schedules, sharing lecture notes and messaging classmates. But university-specific groups might also increase engagement among college users who don’t feel comfortable using the social network the way students did before their teachers, parents and bosses joined.

Not all schools are eligible for groups yet. Users can check the groups for schools page or wait to see a message appear on the left side of their home page when the feature is available to them. Once users join their school community, they are able to create subgroups for individual classes, study groups, clubs, teams, dorms or friends. Users can join groups for multiple schools as long as they have an active email address for each. This is necessary for study abroad or transfer students.

On group pages there will be a tab for files. Users can share non-copyrighted documents and other files with members of a school group. Anyone in a school group can upload and download files within that group. When users upload a revised version of a file, the previous version of the file remains available. Users can also message any confirmed member of their school community without being friends first.

Facebook began testing school-specific groups in December 2011, among Brown and Vanderbilt students. At the time we wondered whether university groups would be a start to a broader initiative to get more people familiar with Facebook’s offerings around small-group sharing. Since then the social network has redesigned groups a few times and given events more group-like functionality.

The way groups for schools restrict access to users with a designated .edu email address is reminiscent of the way networks operated when Facebook began in 2004. File sharing is another former feature from the social network’s college-only days. Founder Mark Zuckerberg built a peer-to-peer file sharing application called Wirehog on top of the social network, but then-Facebook president Sean Parker encouraged him to shut it down to avoid copyright infringement issues. File sharing would be a useful feature for other non-school groups, but preventing illegal media sharing would certainly be difficult.

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Facebook Users Can Now Opt Into Letting Friends Export Their Email Addresses via Download Your Information

Previously, Facebook’s Download Your Information tool let users export an archive of their status updates, photos, as well as a list of friends’ names, but not their contact information. Now, Facebook allows users to opt into having their email address included in exports by their friends, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports.

The feature will allow Facebook to deflect criticism that it doesn’t permit data portability by saying that users have the option but choose not to let friends export their email addresses for use in other web services, including Google+.

Facebook launched Download Your Information so users could back up the social content they own, in case they lost their local copy of data such as their photos. It was designed for personal use, with David Recordon, Facebook’s senior open programs manager saying at its launch event “We built this product as something that’s useful for people, not for other developers.” It wasn’t meant to be used to seed a profile and social graph on another web service.

Google and Facebook blocked or put up roadblocks on importing and exporting data between their services in November 2010. Google had accused Facebook of not supporting data portability because users couldn’t export email addresses of friends, but could import addresses from services like Gmail. Facebook responded saying the email addresses of friends are not a user’s own data, and therefore they don’t have the right to export them. Meanwhile, it allowed these same email addresses to be exported through Yahoo! Mail and some smaller third-party email services.

Now Facebook users can authorize their email to be exported when friends use Download Your Information. The option is buried within the folded “Email” settings in Account Settings. Few users regularly visit their account settings, and even fewer would expanded an area that presumably only allows you to change your email address. The placement of the feature here will allow Facebook to say it exists without the risk that most users will actually enable address exporting.

Google’s new social network Google+ bases friend discovery on email addresses, so if users could export the email addresses of all their Facebook friends, they could easily find them on Google+. Facebook clearly doesn’t want this to happen, but doesn’t want to appear to be hoarding user data — a key fear of users that might make them more likely to switch social networks.

Users have little to lose by enabling the option, unless they have friends who would share their email address with unscrupulous developers or spammers. It will make them easier to find around the web, and help friends stay in contact by email if they ever choose to leave Facebook.

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