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A Warning About iOS 6 and Facebook Integration

October 26, 2012 | 1 Minute Read

One of the marquee features of the just-released iOS 6 for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch is Facebook integration. While iOS 6 will make it much easier to share on Facebook from a wide variety of apps and iOS services, there is one very important change that you may not be happy about: if you have Facebook integration turned on in iOS 6 and you sync your contacts with Facebook, the primary email address for each person in your address book may be replaced by their @facebook.com email address.

This is a big deal, and will no doubt be a hassle for many people. TUAW (The Unoffical Applw Weblog) has a great writeup about this issue. Note that unlike what happened to people using the iOS 6 beta, email addresses won't be deleted in your iOS contacts. It's just that the @facebook.com email address will become the primary email address that iOS uses. Other email addreses (like your @jhsph.edu address) will still be there for you to choose, but iOS will default to the @facebook.com address if Facebook contact sync is turned on.

If you don't have Facebook contact sync turned on, you won't have this problem. If you do have Facebook contact sync turned on (and it's on by default in iOS 6), the most you can do is hide your @facebook.com address on your Facebook profile so that iOS 6 does not try to sync it. That will work for you, but not for anyone else who hasn't done this.