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September 4, 2007
Social Networking Site Quechup Makes No Friends
Boing Boing: Quechup is rotten: don't accept invites - 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 anally rapes your address book, and violates 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).
By "anally rapes" Xeni means "uses the address book info you provide it to send invitations without any indication that it plans to do so."
That's repulsive behavior, and it's a very good reminder that feeding anything you find online your whole address book is a really bad idea.
I was going to say something about how it makes sense to hold off on any social networking site until its bona fides can be established, but Quechup's apparently been up to this since last March, at least.
Yesterday I linked to a Wired article about the slow sales in privacy protection, including a quote from a researcher who said people often won't spend so much as a quarter to protect personal information online: "People prefer money over data, always."
People prefer convenience over data, too.
I just glanced at my address book, by the way, curious about who from my company I would end up spamming if a service I used decided to send invitations to everybody: Just my boss, the CEO, a few vice presidents and the head of HR, so really nobody at all who'd raise an eyebrow if their personalized Quechup spam arrived in the middle of the day.
Posted by mhall at 1:13 PM | Add Comment
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