‘Tagged.com’ To Be Sued – A Call For Moral Standards For SNS?
Mid-level social networking sites were always criticized for their use of lewd methods to target users. Now it seems that the State of New York plans to sue the social-networking site Tagged.com for allegedly using fake e-mails to gain new users.
The charges claims that Tagged sent 60 million e-mails from April through June, to people saying that members of the site had tagged them in photos but the photos did not exist at all. The petition also says that Tagged devised an illegal plan to lure new members and artificially inflate traffic on its site, they even disguised these solicitations mails to appear as if they were coming from a personal contact, when they were actually spams.
The whole modus operandi was operational-zed by asking users to invite their friends through open inviters and those e-mail addresses were finally used to harvest users with spam mails.
Tagged was Started in 2004 by Harvard students, Tagged.com was ranked 9th by Nielsen in social networking list. In June 2009, TechCrunch ranked Tagged as the 6th most valuable social networking site in the world according to their unique “social network valuation model.
The tagged spam practice was extensively blogged but what really goes unreported is the same practices employed by other such mid-level social networking site. This seems to be in fashion specially with major regional social networks too.
The problem never ends only to attract new users. Many SNS even use such techniques to provoke responses from inactive users. In India a major social networking site sends mail to its users telling them that few girls have visited their profiles recently. Many mid-size social networking sites are out thwarting each other to gain extra users so that they can command a premium valuation. This valuation game itself calls for another matrix to value Social networking sites in current complex scenarios.
Social networking space is also becoming bigger each day and now affects millions of users. This certainly calls for some morale ethics for the industry to follow. This suit only recounts the current practices and the need to regulate Social networking sites. It would be in everyone’s interest if the SNS make a first move in such direction.
How to best avoid this “tagged”, “scam” and others like it?
Practice a few tried-and-true tips that you should always keep in mind when logging on:
- Don’t ever respond to an e-mail solicitation asking you to visit a website and provide personal information — e-mail address, password, credit-card number, etc. That includes “phishing” scams from entities claiming to be financial institutions like Bank of America, Citibank, the IRS, etc. These institutions stress that they would never ask for that information via e-mail.
- Don’t ever open any attachment from someone you do not know, or one that looks like it could have any shady connotation.
- Don’t ever respond to any e-mails asking for money via cash, check, wire transfer, etc. Known commonly as a “Nigerian e-mail scam,” these messages will usually ask for money and will promise to give you some back in return. They may be from businessmen in other countries, or from others purporting to be in dire need of assistance. Don’t fall for it!
- Before you give out any personal information over the phone or via the Internet, contact the supposed sender to make sure you know who you’re dealing with. Make sure the website you use to verify identification is legitimate. Do NOT just copy and paste a URL given to you in a suspicious e-mail into your browser!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS Feed OR Email Alerts!
Leave a Comment and Follow the replies through Post Comment Feed