60 million stung in social networking rip-off | Hacker News Reader

60 million stung in social networking rip-off

independent.co.uk

49 pointsvaksel19 comments

It's kinda funny to follow what's going on with Tagged.

About 2 years ago I had just accepted an offer with Scribd, but already had an interview set up with Tagged, so I decided to go to the interview just for the experience. I had initially declined the Tagged interview after looking at their site (asking myself "Would I ever use this?" and the answer was "Hell no"), but Greg Tseng called me and convinced me to change my mind. Man, that guy can talk - he's very smart and very persuasive. He told me about how they were already very profitable and about his team's expertise with "viral marketing" <cough>. So I decided to go and see what it was like.

I arrived at the interview in a lovely loft office downtown SF and met with the engineers who asked me to solve some low level complex computer science brain teasers. Having spent all of my previous 8 years building web systems for major universities and billion dollar companies and no time practicing computer science brain teasers, I failed pretty miserably ;)

Anyway, it obviously wasn't going to be a match, but it was an interesting life experience nonetheless. Fortunately working at Scribd was great - super great team and really interesting problems to solve.

Tagged is a bottom feeder, but they they aren't really the worst of the worst. To some degree, I think having annoying, yet relatively harmless (They didn't install a keylogger, execute XSS against bank accounts, or format hard drives) companies like this in the Internet Ecosystem is a bit like vaccinating people against the truly dangerous diseases.

Over time, people will become a _little_ more savvy about clicking on these "Your friend just sent you X", be more alert to phishing, use slightly more secure and heterogeneous mail clients/browsers.

And then, when a truly dangerous black hat shows up, they won't have free reign over a completely unsuspecting populace.

Indeed, the general populace still does not know how to behave safely on the Internet, and only time can change that. Wasn't Tagged asking for your email password to read your contacts. If that's the case, the fact that even small percentage of those 60 million people willingly gave it up shows how naive people are.

I respect your faith in the general populace but I doubt that they'll become more savvy. Easy usage beats savvy computer practice on any day. Look at Facebook usage and the astounding amount of personal information that people reveal (especially the latest most tech savvy generation).

In my experience it's much less than it used to be--people sharing their AIM screen names, for instance, have almost universally stopped doing so, and physical addresses have disappeared too. Most people even lie about their relationship status.

The problem is that new people are still joining the internet and will continue to do so in the near future. They need to be protected from this kind of behavior. Some people argue that getting scammed is the only way people will learn, but that's debatable.

Tagged sucks, but the article omits the key fact that it only sent out emails to your contact list if you gave it access to your email account. It wasn't as simple as "Any click resulted in the same thing, Cuomo said: Every person on a user's contact list received an email".

Blaming only the company doesn't help people learn the appropriate lesson of "don't share your password."

While I agree with the idea that you should never share your password, you're blaming the victim. Having read a few accounts of their exploits now, this company is manipulating these people.

Some victims deserve blame. It's the rare con job that plays on our virtues and wisdom rather than our stupidity and baser desires.

So they deserve what they got for wanting to see pictures posted by their friends?

I don't think it rises to that level, but tedunangst and gojomo are both right in that imprudent user behavior was a necessary condition of this happening.

Finally. The shady practices of Tagged are disgusting, I hope something actually comes out of this(a fine would be nice).

Let's see: a social network using sleazy spamy user-acqusition techniques; a grandstanding state attorney general, and users who casually share their address books and mail logins with third party sites. Help! There's no one in this story to root for!

Maybe you don’t hate spam as much as I do, but I’ll root for the state attorney general.

Tagged Terms of Service:

"...Tagged reserves the right to modify or amend this Agreement at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all, at Tagged's sole discretion. The most recent version of this Agreement will be posted on the Tagged website. Although Tagged will provide notice of material changes to this Agreement on the Tagged website, as a Member it is your sole responsibility to keep yourself apprised of any such modifications or amendments. Should Member object to any terms and conditions of the Agreement or any subsequent modifications thereto or become dissatisfied with Tagged in any way, Member's only recourse is to immediately: (1) discontinue use of Tagged; (2) terminate Tagged registration; and (3) notify Tagged of termination."

So, here're the terms but we can change them at any time for no reason at all and it's your responsibility to keep up.

Don't most terms of service have a clause in them similar to that?

I wonder how well their SQL scaled?

What? Too soon? ;)

I wish there were some way to simply make it illegal to send emails to someone's contact list, no matter how many "yes, it's ok" check-boxes they click.

I lay some of the blame at the big-boys' feet (Facebook and friends) for getting users accustomed to this kind of behavior. Now people are so used to giving out their email credentials that they never stop to think that it's ALWAYS a bad idea.

/me wonders what Terry Chay has to say about this...

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