How To Undo Facebook Hiding Your Email Address Before Your Friends Use iOS 6 Contact Sync
Millions of people are downloading iOS 6 right now, and many will use the Facebook contact sync feature to pull in photos and current phone numbers of friends. But rather than your real email address …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook’s email-address policy had already created contact-book failures: in July it described the syncing issue as a bug to be fixed, while reports warned that iOS 6 could place Facebook.com addresses in users’ address books. The iOS rollout turns that earlier contact-syncing problem from an isolated settings dispute into a broad distribution event.
The dispute also follows Facebook’s move to link its Facebook email addresses with Timeline names. Users had previously been able to export friends’ email addresses through an opt-in feature, making control over which address is shared newly consequential.
First-order effects
- Facebook users who change their settings can make a personal email address available to friends before iOS 6 contact syncing imports Facebook profile data.
- iOS 6 users who rely on Facebook contact sync risk receiving Facebook.com addresses for friends who leave Facebook’s hiding setting in place.
Second-order effects
- Facebook bears the support burden of a privacy-default decision that surfaces as an address-book reliability problem inside Apple’s contact-syncing feature.
- The rollout makes the usable value of Facebook contact sync dependent on profile-data settings, rather than solely on whether users choose to enable syncing.
Third-order effects
- As social platforms become address-book data sources, control of a user’s public contact identity becomes a practical interoperability issue: a platform default can determine what reaches another company’s device software.
- The episode points toward greater pressure for clearer consent and correction flows where profile information is exported into third-party contact books.
The trend: Social networks are becoming identity-data infrastructure, making privacy defaults consequential when external address books automatically consume profile fields.