Facebook goes behind your back to present your profile to people you've chosen not to friend

Facebook goes behind your back to present your profile to people you've chosen not to friend

by Jason Clarke Jun 14th 2009

Hot on the heels of Facebook's big username land-grab comes news that Facebook may be using the email addresses you import even after you choose not to add them as friends.

The issue occurs if and when you let Facebook search your email contacts for people to invite to become your Facebook friend. As part of this process Facebook will list every contact you have that is already on Facebook, and offer you the chance to "friend" them all at once. You can choose to uncheck the ones that you don't want to friend, essentially skipping them, or choose to skip all of them.

While Facebook makes it clear that they will not store the password for your email account, what they don't make so clear is that they will store the addresses of everyone it found in your email account and keep them associated with you, even the ones that you chose to skip.

Note: Here's a thought about this from me, Don... When reading this article, I immediately thought of an even bigger problem with this behavior by FaceBook... If your like me, you have all your e-mail accounts set to auto add all e-mail addresses that you reply to. And many of them end up not actually being friends or social contacts. But instead, people or businesses that you don't want following you on a Social Site. Now we could just constantly go through our address books and delete those unwanted Contacts.... But who has the time or the Want To, to keep up with that. Those Contacts are harmless to us... As long as we keep them Private that is...

Read more...

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/06/14/facebook-goes-behind-your-back-to-present-your-profile-to-people/

Don