Join Quechup! Spam your friends!
p2pnet news | Off Topic:- I’m in Canada and, like thousands of other people around the world, I’m being heavily spammed to join Quechup, touted as a new social network site.
It’s the same for Anna Creech in the States and Bill Thompson over in England.
Last week, I got an invitation to join Quechup, a new social networking site, from someone I’m pretty sure doesn’t want to network with me. Unfortunately, this person uses Gmail, which adds all new email addresses to the contacts list, whether you want it to or not. Since this person had emailed me in the past, my email address was still in their contacts list.
The problem with Quechup is that during the account creation process for new users, they are asked to give permission for Quechup to view their email address books in order to see if any of their contacts are already on Quechup. What most people seem to miss is the fine print that indicates Quechup will be spamming everyone in the new user’s contact list who is not already on Quechup.
There’s little to be done about things like this – except promote their despicable practices, add them to our filters and ensure that they go away. And remember to check the blogosphere before signing up for anything, as there will usually be someone who got there before you and has discovered the downside.
One final point: if I wanted to build a nice active email list for spamming then creating a fake social network site would seem like a pretty cheap way of going about it …
Posts Xeni Jardin on Boing Boing:
While you were Burning / vacationing / spacing out offline this Labor Day weekend, many folks online were hit with invitations from a social networking service called Quechup that violates your address book, and abuses user trust by spamming all your contacts.
Now that people are coming back from the Labor Day holiday, expect a bunch of invites – I’ve received a dozen just this morning. Delete ‘em if you know what’s good for you. Link to one of many first person accounts, Link to another. And another, and another (punch line: the spam blast created by Quechup caused Google to suspended that victim’s Gmail account).
Yaari.com, a social-networking site for Indians and their friends around the world, behaves similarly, says Adam Stanhope in a Boing Boing comment.
“Stay away from Yaari.com as well!”
Cheers!
Jon
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