Facebook's Use of Images for Email Addresses
Why does Facebook convert profile email addresses to images from text?
I noticed this while visiting a friend's profile where I realized he, sadly, changed his email address when he changed ISPs (dude, seriously, stop using email addresses tied to your ISP).
I tried to grab his new address so I could update his contact information, but no, I couldn't grab it because it was an image rather than text:
Why do they do this? Who are they protecting? I only have access to the email addresses of my friends and others who've opted to allow public access to their profile information, so I don't understand how this could be a spam prevention strategy.
Any theories?
Not only that but on the iPhone Facebook version email addresses aren't visible at all, as they appear to be Flash and Flash is not supported. I'm surprised Facebook hasn't fixed this being that their iPhone version is great and probably one of the most used iPhone web apps. I remember this always being an image, way back in the dark ages of 2004, which was years before the granular access control / permissions that Facebook currently supports. Now for the reasons you mention especially, this seems outdated and doing more damage than good.
The email address is shown in text in the News Feed when it's added or changed, if that's an update you see/send. So, I don't know what the purpose is behind the image.
If they make your profile publicly accessible one day, using an image instead of text will ensure your e-mail address is not spidered by spammers.
Surely Facebook do this on purpose to increase the value of their in-house messaging system, otherwise we'd all just click the email link and talk like that instead.
There's the occasional solution that pops up for people who want to circumvent this annoyance, such as automatically converting these to text as they are loaded, or downloading one's entire Facebook contact list - a feature Facebook should really implement, as Google and LinkedIn have.
1. Posted by: Alison on November 7, 2007 1:18 PM:
From an accessibility viewpoint its a nightmare. Just how are blind people supposed to access?