Facebook Puts Email Addresses on User Profiles Back Into Plain Text
Facebook has been investing in tools to detect and block automated systems and scripts created by spammers heavily in recent years. When it comes to user email addresses on Facebook profiles, Facebook for years has taken the extra step of listing user emails in an image format in order to make it harder for scripts to scrape massive numbers of email addressess. However, it has recently switched to providing them in plain text. Why?
A Facebook spokesperson told us today:
Showing email addresses in plain text makes it easier for people to use the information to connect with their friends. We’ve improved our tools for detecting and preventing profile scraping over the last few years such that this additional precaution is no longer necessary.
For the average user, the change’s impact is only that they can now copy and paste email addresses from Facebook profiles.
OCR, or optical character recognition, has become a more widely understood technology in recent years. Formatting text within an image, as Facebook has done, does not necessarily provide meaningfully greater security. In fact, some companies have used such tools to scrape email addresses from within Facebook (that didn’t work out for other reasons).
Facebook is also trying to make email sharing easier in other ways, like allowing users to provide emails or email aliases to developers on the platform.
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Well nice to know that now email address on profiles are in plain text. Thanks for the update.
February 4th, 2010 at 2:07 am
[...] to Inside Facebook, a Facebook spokesperson told them: Showing email addresses in plain text makes it easier for people [...]
February 4th, 2010 at 2:12 am
This is a very wise move by Facebookk. Truly the are making the Web more Open. I can now build a better email lists of my contacts :)
February 4th, 2010 at 3:18 am
[...] folks from InsideFacebook were able to get in touch with the folks from Facebook and get a little more information about the [...]
February 4th, 2010 at 9:42 am
This is a great move by Facebook. Obviously this has, and will be abused by email marketing companies, but thinking of future, this will certainly help build more cohesion between web artifacts lying all around on the internet. We are working on one such effort of converting “indexed data” to “semantic information” and such moves by various companies would help building semantic web more quickly.
http://apps.ellipsissolutions.com/dive
cheers,
GT
February 4th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
[...] Inside Facebook RSS Feed Subscribe by Email [...]
February 4th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
[...] Facebook Puts Email Addresses on User Profiles Back Into Plain Text [...]
February 7th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Facebook e l’email marketing…
Da alcune settimane Facebook ha ampliato le proprie API per permettere alle applicazioni di richiedere l’indirizzo email degli utenti. Fino ad oggi, infatti, tramite API si potevano ottenere tantissime informazioni, ma non l’indirizzo email. Ho sempr…
May 26th, 2010 at 2:09 am
this is a very wise decision taking by facebok,atleast i can have more better contact in my emails list
June 27th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
jam
February 6th, 2011 at 7:58 pm
I’m also glad if you can show the email address of the person who might be using other people picture and name just to embarrassing the other true person.
So..please show the email beside the picture.
February 11th, 2011 at 10:19 am
Actually facebook has turned all my contact emails into images ONLY WHEN I USE FACEBOOK FROM CHROME in order to avoid that i export my friends’ emails using a chrome app, i got to export 200 of them today until they made the change. At the same time, in firefox i still see all my contacts’ emails as text. I think that proves what facebook is doing and why..
February 11th, 2011 at 2:38 pm
@Daniel: I’m seeing emails as text in both Chrome and Firefox.