(NEWS CENTER) - Right or wrong, Facebook has a reputation for making changes to its site without telling anyone. This week Facebook changed users' contact emails to be their Facebook email address.
This was not an obvious change. You'd have to be watching your contact information closely to have seen it. If it wasn't for a large outcry on Facebook (and on many blogs) it would have slipped by.
To change it back, log onto Facebook and go to your own "about" section. Scroll down to contact info on the right hand side of the page. There you should see just your Facebook email. Click the "edit" tab next to where it says "Contact Info." Once you've clicked edit, you should see all of the email addresses that you've entered. Select your normal email. You'll also want to edit this information so it's not public and only available to your friends.
You can keep the Facebook email if you like. Most people don't pay any attention to it. It's tied into your private messages. You can also give that Facebook email to anyone NOT on Facebook so that they can email you within Facebook. That means that if some non-Facebook user emails you to that Facebook email you will see it in the private messages section under "other."
Facebook explained this latest move in a statement to the social media news site Mashable. The company said it basically wanted to make Facebook more consistent across the site. Mashable points out that while Facebook did make an announcement back in April about syncing Timeline and Facebook email, it never mentioned making your Facebook email your primary email and hiding your other emails.