In an effort to enhance email address privacy, Facebook has stepped on a lot of toes with its latest move, widely seen as an attempt to increase usage of @facebook.com email addresses. In case you haven't noticed, your personal email address has been hidden from your profile, regardless of your previously selected privacy settings. Now, your friends can only see your @facebook.com contact info. Basically, Facebook has set your personal address by default to "hidden."

Facebook announced its unified messaging product back in November 2010, enabling users to view Messages, Chats, and emails sent to @facebook.com addresses, all from the Messages inbox. At the time, the social networking site allowed users to sign up for a vanity email address, and started notifying people that everyone will get generic ones in April. With that rollout completed, Facebook added "shown" or "hidden from Timeline" options to each listed email address, in an effort to give users more control over the visibility of all their addresses.

People could already send you a message on Facebook via a button on your profile, so Facebook likely thought it would be easier to default @facebook.com addresses instead of your personal email address. This move, however, is widely seen as a devious attempt from Facebook to boost awareness of its own email addresses that hardly anyone uses.

Reset your Controls

To restore the email address visibility you had before, go to your Facebook profile and click the "About" link below your cover. In the "Contact Info" section select "Edit," then at the top right change "Hidden from Timeline" into "Shown on Timeline" for all your personal email addresses. If you don't want any emails coming to your Facebook Messages inbox, you can hide your @facebook.com address.

You can also set privacy controls for each address, according to who you want to see it. For instance, you can set your personal email address as visible only to friends, your work address visible to a specific group, and so on.

Facebook might have considered it ok to set @facebook.com addresses to default because people could already send messages via the Message button on someone's profile. Still, users who have specifically set up their profiles to show their personal email addresses expect Facebook to do just that. Facebook may be a free, optional service, but modifying these settings without strong notifications to users has angered many. Although this may be an effort to give users more privacy, nobody wants their settings to be disregarded without warning.