Convenience. Facebook, for many people (myself somewhat included), has replaced email as the primary method of staying in touch. When email is only being used for website signups and a few similar, non-primary tasks, merging it into what you use all the time makes a reasonable amount of sense.
(Honestly, but not part of the point above, I don't have any issues trusting Facebook and Google with my data. I find it much less likely they will be hit with a Sony than others, and any really private data I have wouldn't go into any hosted service.)
This is about using Facebook as your email account. Are you really claiming that it's a reasonable fear Facebook will somehow make your emails public?
This seems like pure knee-jerk "facebook = privacy problem" thought to me. I can't imagine Facebook making your emails public any more than I can imagine Google doing it.
It's a trust issue. One of those companies has repeatedly broken my trust on a very important issue, the other not.
I know gmail scans my message contents for contextual advertising, but it would never surprise me if facebook subsequently sold my email address to advertisers based on the content of messages, both current and historical.
why on earth would you trust anyone with anything?
not saying I'm retiring my gmail account, just that there are plenty of ways that it might make sense for certain cases, despite some folks' knee-jerk inclination to distrust this one particular company.
Yeah - I was responding to "how can one trust facebook with email" -- because the users who would trust facebook are "dumb fucks" according to facebook's founder.
