Facebook's "is following Pages on" email is deceptive
You may receive regular notification emails from Facebook depending on how you have configured your account's privacy settings on the site. You can get notified on a variety of topics, from actions that involve you to news about photos that you have been tagged on and activities of close friends on the site.
I recently checked emails of a secondary account that I maintain for test purposes and noticed that it listed a "Martin Brinkmann is following Page on Facebook" email. Since I knew that I did not make any recent changes to the pages that I followed on the site, I decided to take a closer look.
The second sentence of the email read "Like the Pages you are interested in to get updates in your news feed". It was followed by a list of six pages, Swarovski, Bulgari, Tiffany and so on that I knew that I had not liked (except for one of the six and I unlinked that some time ago as well).
The email makes it look like as if I'm following those pages even though it is not explicitly mentioning in the email. The email is one of Facebook's social ads that tries to get Facebook users to like certain pages on the social networking site.
There does not seem to be an option on Facebook that you can modify so that your name is not being used in emails that Facebook sends out to friends. What you can do however is turn them off for your own account if you have not done so already.
- Click on the down arrow on the top right (or the gear icon if you are using the old Facebook interface) and select settings from the menu while on Facebook.
- Switch to Notifications here.
- Here you see how you get notifications and what you get notifications about.
- Locate "Close Friends Activity", click Edit and change it to "Off" or "On Facebook".
- Note that this may include other types of news that you may be interested in. My suggestion would be to set this to "On Facebook" so that you have access to the information after all.
I know that this is not new but I saw this email for the first time as I have disabled all notifications to my email on my main account.
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More and more I am getting the proof that the Facebook administrators are rotten to the core/ bone.
And they’re not the only company who are proofing over and over again that there commercial well been is more important than good manors.
And here is the extra bonus. I know I am sounding like a old man but compared to 1970 things did not improve.
I’ve also been seeing this happen for my test account.
Initially it seemed to only included pages I’d liked. Then I saw some with a mix of both liked & completely unrelated pages. Now they seem to be all containing pages I’ve never liked. This is becoming bloody annoying to say the least.
Yes, I found out the same thing on my FB account. They were saying I follow Pages, then they listed some conservative, right wing political orgs as examples. I am outraged. This is yet another reason I am not posting anything anymore to FB. The account is now static.
Martin, way to call out Facebook! I too have a test account for Facebook and have received emails saying that “Jason Sparks is following Pages on Facebook” that lists pages that I’m not following. Similarly there is a line in small font that says “Like the Pages you are interested in to get their updates in your news feed.” I think it’s too deceptive, and FB should change the copy to be more clear because these emails currently make me distrust FB which ultimately will hurt their brand.