Re: Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. [amitchell () isipp com]
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 9:15 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Facebook & Addressbook Snarfing Pt II: Speeddate.com = the Gander?

Dave,

Best practices advises against offering address book importing in any
form which requires your user to enter their username and password
for a third-party service, and we have a firm policy that we will
*not* accredit a company which does it.

Perhaps more interesting to your readers might be this article we
wrote about the practice (with Flixster at the subject) - which
garnered so much attention that the CEO of Flixster himself came and
entered into a dialogue through the comments section, trying to
justify the practice:

http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/is-flixster-a-big-fat-spammer-are-
they-hacking-your-aol-or-hotmail-address-book

We also exposed one of the companies that is selling the software/
scriptware to do it:

http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/the-company-behind-all-that-address-
book-scraping

Again, it's *very* bad policy;  the internet receiving and security
industries have spent *years* educating users to *never* enter their
passwords in third-party sites;  now, within a year or so, the social
networking and other sites have nearly completely undone that
education, all in the name of making an extra buck by spamming all of
their users' friends.

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




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