Are You Getting Quechup Spammed?
One controversial issue among social networks is how hard they should push for user acquisition. Most social networks these days let you to import your email address book in some way (Twitter is the latest), but most make it clear if they’re about to mail your contacts.
One site that’s catching people off guard is Quechup: we’ve got a volley of complaints about them in the mailbox this weekend, and a quick Google reveals that others were caught out too.
The issue lies with their “check for friends” form: during signup you’re asked to enter your email address and password to see whether any of your friends are already on the service. Enter the password, however, and it will proceed to mail all your contacts without asking permission. This has led to many users issuing apologies to their friends for “spamming” them inadvertently. Hopefully the bad PR on this one will force them to change the system.
In related news, ZDnet investigates social services Rapleaf and UpScoop, pointing out that they’re run by TrustFuse, a company that sells data to marketers. UpScoop lets you enter your email address and password and find all your friends on social networks. The company is not selling the email addresses you input, but those clients who already have lists of email addresses can bring those to TrustFuse and receive additional information about those people mined from public social networking profiles. The aggregation of all that data is perfectly legal and perhaps even ethically sound, but it’s a little unnerving for some.
Loading ...
Subscribe to Mashable
Popular Tags
Sponsors
Mashable Rocks
Events
Recent Jobs
The Sun Startup Review
Sponsored By:
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.mashable.com%2Fimages%2Fsidebar%2Fcv.jpg)
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.mashable.com%2Fimages%2FEdgeCastLogoTag2.jpg)
![[image]](http://mowser.com/img?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.mashable.com%2Fimages%2Fsidebar%2Fmediat2.png)
Trackbacks
41 Comments
Here is my take on that:
http://www.chrishambly.com/content/quechup-and-mass-hysteria
Am I the only who finds irony that right below this post about Quechup, the advertisement is for Userplane, which has a business relationship with Quechup’s corporate investor iDate. I suppose no one cares…
The ads are dynamic - I can’t currently see that ad. And based on what you just said, the relationship isn’t exactly a direct one - it would be more ironic if there was an ad for Quechup right under the post.
The same thing happened to me when I signed up for StumbleUpon. I was mortified.
Quechup.com is owned by Idate Corp.
Rather than resorting to a witchhunt perhaps it is best to go to the source to get the answers?
According to their website, http://www.idatecorp.com, their CEO is Mark Finch and can be contacted at mark@idatecorp.com. Glen Finch is the Vice President and can be contacted at glen@idatecorp.com.
The site also has other useful information including their advisors which lists addresses of legal counsel, accountants and others in both the US where they are incorporated under Idate Corp. and the UK where they are known as Idate Ltd.
I am sure that as a socially responsible company they are going to be interested in hearing everyone’s views about the quality of their service.
Good luck!
seems like their webadmin tried to defend himself -> http://art2blog.wordpress.com/2007/08/02/attention-ignore-quechup-invites/
The really stupid part about this is that several other sites have done this in the past, and every time it has pissed off users and created a PR fiasco. Amazing that they wouldn’t learn from the mistakes of several others.
I can’t believe that people are trusting enough with their email passwords that they just give it away to any old social networking website!
This sounds like the same thing upscoop is doing. They spam your entire mailing list when you login to their site.
Hi Pete
Here’s my note these morons sent via their internal mail system. Thanks to Arian, commenter above, I’ll harass the bottom feeder owners/managers of this spam site, sorry in advance for a long note:
“Guys
I was invited by a blogging acquaintance, Hugh MacLeod to join your site.
Sadly I did without doing proper due diligence and the iDate owners, marketing geniuses and your software designers, a bunch of bottom feeders-let me be polite and not express my feelings, have serious screwed me over either intentionally or inadvertently. First of all I assumed it was some sort of a social networking site and Quechup turned out to be another spam engine. The fact that I was asked a bunch of personal details should have set off alarm bells but having worked non-stop for 18+ hours I signed on.
I signed up as a heterosexual and most heteros typically would like to meet a WOMAN, unless you play for both teams, which I don’t. So why the heck would you all send it to my entire freaking gmail email list where I have all my professional/business colleagues. And you did not seek my permission either.
This is absolutely unacceptable and if you do not remove my name from your membership rolls and DELETE ALL MY contacts I will inform (whether or not they pay any attention to my email) all the major web 2.0 software review sites including Techcrunch, Gigaom and other even more nastier review sites - its your call. I will do this by
Friday Sept 7th unless you do as I ask and send me mail to confirm that you have deleted my name and my gmail contacts from your database.
Gary Valan”
Write http://www.idatecorp.com to complain. CEO Mark Finch at mark@idatecorp.com. Vice President Glen Finch at glen@idatecorp.com.
Those guys are the ones who came up with this scheme, I’m sure.
The better thing is to checkout the “investors” at iDate and hassle the hell out of them, and explain why their money just went down the tubes. Unless, of course, the whole ruse was to get as many names as possible to sell to mailing lists before the clampdown.
In that case, it’s time to go Finch hunting.
“>alert(1);
alert(’hi’)
hello world.. ravi
looks nice.
Thanks
Very good site very good info keep up the good work
All The Best
thanks
http://www.up3.cc
http://www.6hh6.com
http://www.5o5.cc
http://www.97ra.com
http://www.97ra.com/vb
Is this the only social network that are using spam to get more traffic? Facebook does that?
Regards
Meteko
http://www.nhse.org
I had a bunch of invite e-mails this autumn from people whom I could never suspect to invite me to such network.
So, now the mystery is solved.
I wonder did they thought about consequences and community reaction to this dirty trick?
I got few site http://www.bahamut.net and http://www.web2grid.com also got spam, I wonder what they gain from spamming my sites.