Netizens skeptical over Facebook's new measures

By G Saravanan

Published in The New Indian Express, Chennai on September 29, 2011:

Source: http://expressbuzz.com/cities/chennai/Netizens-skeptical-over-Facebooks-new-measures/318505.html

CHENNAI:  While the new privacy measures introduced by the popular social networking site Facebook since last week have been welcomed by its millions of users across the globe, the action has kicked off a debate among its users in online forums who see it as a step to force them to use Facebook emails in the future to remain on website.

As part of its new privacy measures announced during the ‘Facebook f8 Conference’ in San Francisco, Facebook has stopped sending all types of alerts to mailboxes of its users.Previously, FB users received several alerts pertaining to new friend requests and follow-up comments everyday into their mailboxes (gmail, yahoomail, hotmail, rediffmail and so on).Though these alerts have helped the non-regular FB users to track happenings around them on the social networking site without logging in everyday, many regular users who were addicted to FB for almost 20 hours a day, found it difficult to delete hundreds of alerts from their inboxes each day.
“It’s a real relief for IT professionals like me, who need to clear inboxes everyday (previously) to read other important emails from fellow professionals,” said Elayaraja, who works for AOL in New York.Though many users have welcomed the move, rumours have also started gaining ground that the measure was primarily meant to reduce FB’s dependence on other email servers and to popularise its mail service (abc@facebook.com). After the new privacy measures came into force since last week, all FB users now have to log in to the site to get updates about their friends.