Resolved: Feeding Your Address Book to Social Networking Sites Is Stupid and Rude

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October 3, 2007

Resolved: Feeding Your Address Book to Social Networking Sites Is Stupid and Rude

Christopher Elliot is unhappy with StumbleUpon, which he says changed the state of his choices, resulting in over 9,000 people getting a membership pitch:

I told the site that I had a Gmail account, and it offered to send out two categories of invitations on my behalf. Either invite friends who already have StumbleUpon accounts (good idea) or invite everyone in your address book — nearly 9,000 people — to sign up for StumbleUpon (not a good idea). I unchecked the second option and then scrolled up and checked on the first.

The system then automatically, and without my explicit approval, checked everything. By the time I knew what was happening, everyone was getting an invitation to join StumbleUpon. Now, if you're a friend of mine, you can probably just laugh this off. But this e-mail went to everyone I had sent a message to in the last four years. And there were people in there who I'm sure did not want to hear from me.

O.k. This is getting stupid.

You've got Queuchup snarfing address books and blasting out spam, you've got Rapleaf using fear and uncertainty to compel people to register, then using their address books to spam even more people, and now StumbleUpon with its variation on the zombie address book lead generation trick.

I can't believe I'm typing this, but I have to hand it to Rapleaf: At least its fear-mongering come-ons didn't bother to announce who, exactly, decided to commercialize your connection to them. StumbleUpon just comes out and tells them.

It's bad because someone has to deal with another piece of spam. That's annoying but livable. It's bad because StumbleUpon is handed a chunk of e-mail addresses that are probably good ones, including addresses the friends you set up for the spam might have entrusted to just a few people. It's also bad because of some unintended side effects it might have.

When Elliot wrote "[T]his e-mail went to everyone I had sent a message to in the last four years. And there were people in there who I'm sure did not want to hear from me," I thought "and in other cases, there could be people in there whom the owner of the hijacked address list might not want to hear from, too.

Social networking sites offer address book snarfing to help themselves to a big pool of potential users. People offer up their address books because they're too lazy to type in a few select addresses on their own. Worse, if they're too lazy to type in those addresses, they're probably too lazy to read the privacy policy or terms of service, so they can't even vouch for what will happen to all those addresses.

What's amazing to me is that this sort of behavior hasn't already joined the list of other canonically boorish 'net behavior, like typing in all caps, cross-posting crackpot 9/11 theories to all of Usenet, or using your OC-3 connection at work on Unreal servers with "High Ping" in the title. In the real world, when we fill out a subscription card to "Poodle Fancy" with someone else's name and drop it in the mailbox with a nasty little snicker, we're being jerks.

I'm running out of things that could get someone stuck in my blacklist quicker than volunteering my address to strangers.

Tags: e-mail, privacy, security, social networking, stumbleupon