“Facebook forces all users over to @facebook.com e-mail addresses”

As of Friday, the company seems to have quietly given or replaced the display e-mail addresses of all of its users [on their profiles] with an @facebook.com address.

I thought, who cares? until I read this comment on Reddit:

Where I see this hurting most users is from automatic phone syncs of contacts. Running through my phone, I see all these @facebook email addresses now.

Remember what’s coming this summer? iOS 6, and automatic Facebook contact sync for everyone (I’m under the impression that it’s an option — haven’t installed the beta myself, but I read something to that effect on Twitter — but you can be sure that most people will enable it, because why wouldn’t they? it beats manually entering the info). It’s not like people use e-mail much these days, but it’s still definitely going to make a noticeable difference in usage, and it is a hijacking of people’s email accounts.

So, yeah, I’m moving this from “benign” to “evil.”

And, as a bonus:

Isn’t it funny how this privacy control doesn’t exist anywhere else in the profile settings, and its title (“Shown on Timeline” / “Hidden from Timeline”) doesn’t make any sense for what it actually does, and it can end up completely contradicting the regular privacy control that’s on its left (oddly enough, at Facebook’s benefit)? Even for Facebook, that’s oddly inefficient and obtuse UI, isn’t it?