Fury after Facebook messes up smartphone users’ address books

Remember how Facebook sneakily changed your default email address to @facebook.com?

Well, it seems that the repercussions of that decision by the social network has caused even bigger problems.

Some smartphone users, particularly those using older Android devices, are reporting that their on-phone address books have been silently updated to make @facebook.com email addresses the default way to send a message to their contacts.

See this post, for example, from one affected user on Hacker News:

“This morning my mother was complaining that many of the email addresses in her Droid Razr contacts had been replaced with Facebook ones. It would seem the Facebook app had been populating her address book with emails and contact photos, and decided to migrate all her…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

Found this article interesting? Follow Graham Cluley on Twitter or Mastodon to read more of the exclusive content we post.

Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.