Yes I am, but who am I really?

Just when you decide to stop talking about Facebook and privacy...

So Facebook went ahead and changed my email address; in fact, they changed everyone's email address - switched us all over to our 'Facebook' emails (mine is kate.willcox.52@facebook.com, apparently - catchy) in an effort to gain users for their mail service and capture more market share.

Of course, they let you change it back, and apparently for new users there is going to be an opt in/opt out option, but yet again we see Facebook monkeying with our personal data for their own gain. 

Now I'm sure that lots of people take the view that we have signed up for this in choosing to use Facebook - after all, it's their network, we just live in it. But there is something particularly troubling about a social networking site changing facts about us, and it is compounded in circumstances where the changes made are to further their commercial objectives (not only does it increase use of Facebook mail & decrease use of competitor mail programs, it also turns us all into advertisements for Facebook mail). What is to stop them changing my photos or facts about my life to make them more Facebook friendly? (Here I am in my Facebook tshirt. Here I am posting how cute Mark Zuckerberg is. Except, wait, it wasn't me posting those things!)

There is something almost Orwellian about these erasures - about which we weren't even informed (or if we were I missed the memo) - and they strike at important identifiers about our online identity.

This seems especially ironic to me given that earlier today I was reading twitter's policy on use of the brand (I'm sure Facebook has something similar), and there was a great deal of "thou shalt not" mess around with the trademark - no putting the bird in a cage. Meanwhile, Facebook is messing around with aspects of our trademarks, not to mention our user experience, and apparently there is little we can do about it.

What do you think? Is it a reasonable step for Facebook to take? Should we accept these little incursions into our autonomy - and identity - as the cost of using the network?