Farmville locks out users who won't hand over their email addresses

Popular Facebook game Farmville has caused outrage among users who have found themselves locked out for refusing to hand over access to their email accounts to the game.

According to a tip from @subangel on Twitter:
“anyone who hasn’t given farmville access to their email address on FB is now blocked from accessing the game until they share it.”

Understandly, fans who have been happily using the game up till now are pissed off at the change. Blog FarmvilleFreak are onto the changes and some commenters on the site are saying that they might leave: Jim says – “Not happy. May have to abandon.”

and also: “I don’t want every game I play to send me tons of emails every time it deems something worthy of my attention has happened. I have the FV toolbar to tell me if a harvest is ready – that’s all the reminder I need.”

Though others say they will just cede to yet another request for more information from social networking sites.

And some people are offering tips to get around the new request. Anony says: “BTW, if you click “change”, the email address will become a drop-down list. Pull it down and you will see something like “[email protected]”. Choosing this and clicking “Allow” can let you enter the game while avoiding giving your address to Zynga.”

We’ve fired off a message to the Zynga press team about why they’ve decided to do this and how they can justify their moves to their fans who now can’t access Farmville without handing over more personal details.. I’ll update here when they get back to me.

I guess that they’re just doing it because they can – but they should tread carefully because even Facebook can’t get away with huge