As a blogger, I maintain multiple email accounts. Some accounts I allow to "know" each other, and other accounts I like to keep separate. As a bit of a computer geek, this is just something I do automatically, so that if an account gets hijacked, the damage is limited to only those accounts in the circle of knowledge.
Most software subscriptions allow you to confirm that you are the actual email owner upon initial contact. If you do not confirm, then your email account is left alone. Not so Facebook. It seems to be irrelevant to Facebook whether or not the email given really belongs to the person trying to use it.
No, their "solution" to people accidentally or on purpose using other email accounts is to force their users to register all their email accounts to their Facebook account. From a data gathering point of view it certainly makes sense, except of course, if an email account is linked by someone who doesn't have access to it, then not so much. It seems that FaceBook is more interested in forcing their users to register all their email accounts than it is in keeping them secure.
This thread is full of people including myself, asking FaceBook to help them with their email accounts that have been used by other FaceBook users, shows that FaceBook is not really interested. The reply from the FaceBook person was just to add the email to the FaceBook account, even though doing so is impossible if it's already being used by another FaceBooker.
On another thread on the very same topic, the FaceBook person tells the disgruntled users that the signup process for FaceBook is not complete until the email sent as confirmation is verified. However, a recent comment shows that what the Face Book Help Team person said is not true - that there is no way to get an email address back once another person has used it on FaceBook, whether it is confirmed or not.
I have just become interested in this whole thing again because one of my email accounts has had 30 or so emails sent to it from FaceBook (in Portugese) on behalf of a person who has used it as their main email address. They have also easily added numerous friends and posted a number of updates without ever having to confirm their email address, the email which I still have in my Inbox as proof that the confirmation email from FaceBook does absolutely nothing in preventing email hijacking.
I was at first very frustrated, and after reading the original thread of annoyed FaceBook users, I came across a person suggesting that you search for your email account on FaceBook and report the user. So I searched and I found the offending person, and sent them a message. I didn't know you could search for people by their email account on FaceBook.
Anyway, I then realised I had their email account and what that meant - that I had the entry key into their Facebook user account. All I had to do was tell FaceBook through the log in screen that I had forgotten my password for that account, and I would get the reset password email sent to me. Once I had it, I could change the password and log on. I don't know why this didn't occur to me before - I suppose I just don't think like a hacker.
The ghost train
2 hours ago