Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 07:16:45 -0700
________________________________________ From: Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. [amitchell () isipp com] Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 9:51 AM To: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander? P.S. I forgot to mention - many of these companies make the "log into your address book at AOL / Yahoo / Hotmail/ Gmail " pages look as much like a portal - *in partnership* - with the ISP as they can. The screenshots in the Flixster article shows them using the AOL logo next to the username and password fields because we gave them an AOL address; if you give them a Yahoo address it will display the Yahoo logo, if a Gmail address it will display the Gmail logo, and so on. Thus they *fool* their users into thinking that they are logging in through a connection authorized by their ISP, or that the ISP *approves* of the practice. Trust me, the ISPs do *not* approve. In fact, every ISP we have talked with about this very much is *against* this practice, and we know that the unauthorized use of their logos is being looked at by their legal departments. Unfortunately, there is so much else going on in the legal realm for ISPs (phishing, DDOSing, etc.) that this is such small potatoes, we don't expect to see much done about it. But you cannot find a social networking site out there who is doing this who *has* permission from the ISP to use their logo. And it fools the users every time. In fact, a colleague who works *in Internet security* was themselves fooled by this very tactic, as we both discovered when I got spam from the site that fooled him, because I was in his address book. Kind regards, Anne Anne P. Mitchell, Esq CEO/President Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy http://www.ISIPP.com/ Professor of Law, Lincoln Law School of SJ Author, "The Email Deliverability Handbook" Helping ISPs keep the spam out, and legitimate businesses get their email in, since 1998 http://www.SuretyMail.com/ - a division of ISIPP ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander? David Farber (Jun 09)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander? David Farber (Jun 09)
- Re: Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander? David Farber (Jun 09)
- Re: Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander? David Farber (Jun 09)