Facebook Now Intercepting Your Email?

Whether you signed up for it or not, Facebook has now included a new default email address on your timeline for you. Now all email destined to you will go through Facebook’s email servers, which of course, Facebook has full access to. So yeah, they can sniff your email. Just keep it clean and no one gets hurt.

LifeHacker has a solution:

But Facebook seems at a loss to explain how they suddenly began to handle the email services of hundreds of millions of users. From CNN here:

If you’re a Facebook user, you have a @facebook.com email address, whether you use it or not. Facebook is now automatically posting those addresses to users’ profiles and displaying them as the default email address.

Cue the backlash. Facebook told CNNMoney the change has been rolling out for “a few weeks,” but many users weren’t aware of it until a spate of blog posts and news articles began drawing attention to it on Monday.

“Speaking of hating your users. Facebook forces everyone onto its email system. Really, Facebook?! Really?!” tweeted freelance tech journalist Ron Miller. Blogger Gervase Markham, one of the first to draw attention to the change, was scathing in his comments on it.

“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,” he wrote, referring to a tactic hackers use to intercept electronic messages. “What on earth do they think they are playing at?”

“We basically defaulted to show your Facebook address as we rolled this out, just to keep it consistent for everyone,” said Meredith Chin, Facebook’s manager of product communications.

The change hasn’t hit all accounts yet, but it will roll out eventually to all of Facebook’s 900 million users, Chin confirmed.

Look you can disregard a “man in the middle” scenario. With a billion users, there is no one that can possibly read all of the messages soon to be going directly through Facebook as opposed to external email systems as before.

But they did build the infrastructure to handle it. Every Facebook user I know hates that Facebook keeps tweaking its interface and service. Soon they will tweak themselves to the level of MySpace. I wouldn’t know, having been banned by Facebook for a couple of years now.