Face book reads your messages?

[L. O]

When signing up on FB, I gave my "junk" email address ... a gmail address that I do not check.
I have been a member of FB for about 8 months and have never gotten spammed.
Today, an email came to me in my MAIN EMAIL address (work) inviting me to "join facebook" and that my friends invited me - and it showed pictures of people I already have as friends. Also, one of the "friends" that supposedly invited me to join was ME!
The work email was NEVER posted or entered on FB.
However - last night I sent a FB Message to a friend telling him to email me at work - and GAVE MY WORK email ADDRESS.
Thus: does FB read my messages and grab email addresses out of them - and then send an email marketing message ?? This is suspicious.

[Bumbleshank]

I had a bit of a concern about that, but I figured it out.

I had a friend suggested, that I met in Second Life, but I couldn't figure out how FB knew about them, but I remembered that I did the find friends option a bit back, and got it to scan my email account.... 18 months later, that user signed onto FB, and they seem to keep a list of your contacts from previous lookups... So I'd say "no, they don't scan your emails" - that would be a privacy issue.

[So Gold]

Wow, that is really weird. O_o
Well, what also could have happened is that your work e-mail might be posted on some other site. Sometimes random sites are scanned for e-mails to advertise with.
But if facebook is reading your e-mails, it's probably just scanning or urls or e-mails, not just being snoopy. That is very fishy. You're right to wonder.

[Empire539]

That doesn't seem likely; major corporations like Facebook seldom scan their client's messages for emails solely for marketing purposes.

It's more likely that the friend you sent the work email to added you work email to his address book or contacts. Then, somehow (probably unintentionally), he let Facebook send invitations to his contacts email contacts that did not already have a Facebook (your work email). Those "send invites" run rampant on the site, so I wouldn't be surprised if he did it on accident.

[MB]

That's very possible. it will be in their terms of service agreement that you agreed to when you signed up.
Here's part of it from the Facebook TOS webpage:

Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how we share your content through your privacy and application settings. In order for us to use certain types of content and provide you with Facebook, you agree to the following:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it).

"you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License")
^^^ That says it all right there. So go into the Privacy and Application Settings and turn off whatever you can about sharing.

[pg210]

Facebook has millions of members. Their computer does all the work, not people there. The computer got your work address from somebody.
And you can plan on getting loads of more emails. Can you change your work address? And let that one that the Facebook computer knows about just eventually expire.
Somebody gave Facebook your address.....guess what? Your friend did. Hey!---you told him to!!!
.