Is UpScoop paving the way to unleash SPAM with new changes to their Privacy Policy?
Over the weekend, it “Quechup” got some press for unleashing a tsunami of spam on their unsuspecting users. Unlike most sites that allow you to parse your web mail (i.e. Gmail, Yahoo, etc…) address book, looking for contacts that are already members of the specific websites, Quechup sent out emails to everyone in the address book, asking each person to sign up. They got some negative press for it (as evidenced by this write up on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2007/09/02/quechup/) and caused a number of people to have to send out emails pointing out that it was Quechup that sent out the “sign up!!” SPAM not the individual.
With that as a the background, we have a troubling development on the social networking aggregator “UpScoop” (I’m intentionally leaving all links to the UpScoop site out of this post). Previously, their privacy policy read like this:
After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member’s email address book. NOTE: Upscoop does not email, contact, or spam any friends from an email address book. (http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:uL5Uoiffy6UJ:https://upscoop.com/privacy_policy+upscoop+spam&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us&client=firefox-a)
However, today, it now reads like this:
After a member provides his email address and email password, Upscoop extracts all the email addresses within the member’s email address book.
Notice the difference? It seems clear that UpScoop plans to follow Quechup and start soliciting more people to come to their sites. The question is, will they honor their previous privacy policy or just start mining whatever database they’ve already collected of information concerning users?
With now what appears to be 2 examples of social networking sites doing “questionable” things with the address lists they find when mining address books, I think it’s probably time to stop using these automatic “friend finder” features. I’d love to give sites like Facebook the benefit of the doubt, but it looks like the trend is no longer to use your information to help you connect to your friends, but instead to use your information to help build up marketing databases. I can only blame myself for not recognizing that the later motivation was probably the driving force behind that feature all along.