Why you don’t want to link your work email to Facebook
One of the more interesting new features that was introduced in Outlook 2010 was the Outlook Social Connector. For those of you who haven’t used Outlook 2010, it’s basically it’s a small window below the reading pane that collates information about all the people involved in the selected email conversation. As well as mining your Outlook folders for related messages, calendar items, etc., it can also pull in updates from social networks.
If you install the addin that lets it link to Facebook, you’ll see Facebook updates for those people you are friends with on Facebook. Thing is, it will also look up information even for people you aren’t friends with.
Normally you can’t search just by email address on Facebook, but the Outlook Social Connector does just that. It won’t show you anything that you couldn’t see anyway if you found that person on Facebook manually, but it does find them for you, seamlessly, just based on the email address. So if you have your work email registered on your personal Facebook account, your sexually suggestive profile picture will show up at the bottom of the reading pane when you send me an email:
I went and checked this profile on Facebook (purely in the name of research for this article) and can confirm that the profile did not have the person’s email address publicly visible. However, many of this person’s photos were set to public, and the photo album that had a blow-up doll as the album cover did not encourage me to investigate any further. Nor did it encourage me to do business with the person who had emailed me.
Needless to say, our staff AUP has a strong recommendation to refrain from adding a school email address to Facebook.
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Excellent advice here. My facebook account was setup purely for a demo (of the integrated office web apps), and I’d used my work email address. It was only when I read your article that it jolted me to change it.
And it’s renewed my vow that I will give my own children a completely new email address for when they are applying for university, jobs etc
I have the Outlook Social Connector installed, and find it really useful for me to be able to see what other people are doing on LinkedIn – and especially useful to get a profile picture. And because I hadn’t setup the Facebook link, I’d completely missed that other people could.