How can I hide my private email from Facebook?

April 28, 2010 11:31 AM

How do I dissociate my Spam/private email address from my public Facebook account?

I have what I thought was a throwaway email account that I use when I want to communicate privately. I recently did a search for that address on Facebook, just to see what would happen. It pulled up my personal, public Facebook profile.

I really, really want that to stop happening. How do I do that? This is terrifying ...

posted by chinese_fashion to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Couldn't you just create an entirely new email address for Facebook and remove your throwaway email address from your profile? You can also try inserting an initial into your Facebook name to further confuse search engine indexing. For example, my profile is completely locked down and cannot be indexed by search engines (so Googling the email address associated with Facebook will not result in a match for my profile). None of my FB activity was indexed, EXCEPT... I regularly comment in a group about strange/artistic photos. So, if you Googled my name, you would get nothing but strange, jokey FB comments. The group admin could not lock down the group, so I just changed my Facebook name by adding my middle initial after my first name. As a result, I no longer turn up in FB-related search engine results (even if you google my FB name).

As for you, go through the privacy controls. Make sure that none of your FB info can be indexed. Just explore the privacy setting thoroughly.

And stop being terrified.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:38 AM on April 28, 2010

Is the name on the website linked to your MF profile your real name?
posted by KokuRyu at 11:40 AM on April 28, 2010

You must have added it as an alternate address, there's no way Facebook would associate it with your account otherwise.

Top right-hand corner, go to accounts -> account settings -> e-mail

Also, what you're seeing might not necessarily be what your friends are seeing. Go to ->account -> privacy settings to adjust these settings and see how other people view your page.
posted by futureisunwritten at 11:40 AM on April 28, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks, KokuRyu, but it's more complicated than that. The address associated with Facebook IS my personal, "real" address. But if you search the "throwaway" address on Facebook search, you will pull my profile listing with my real name.

This is bad.
posted by chinese_fashion at 11:47 AM on April 28, 2010

That doesn't make sense, if your throwaway email address does not appear in your profile. You may consider doing the name change.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:50 AM on April 28, 2010

Do other friends / Facebook users associate your throwaway address with your real name? It seems like it's almost possible that one of your friends used the 'find friends' feature and uploaded their address book information to Facebook's servers and somehow your name and that email address are now linked in Facebook's back end.
posted by alynnk at 12:05 PM on April 28, 2010

does the throwaway address have any part of your facebook name/nickname etc.

also, agree with everybody who say its near impossible for facebook to make that association unless you have replied to one of your friends or acquaintances from that address or (more likely) if you had that email address for one of the facebook "apps".
posted by cusecase at 12:57 PM on April 28, 2010

alynnk probably has the right idea. Someone else associated that address with your account and now you're kinda stuck. You can blank your public profile and that might help.

Of course, this is the issue with Facebook in general. You have to trust your friends to look after your own privacy. A first step would be to go to your profile and revoke all the apps that have access there and maybe defriend some of the more careless people?
posted by Mr. Gunn at 2:40 PM on April 29, 2010