Tagged Gets Tagged By New York Attorney General
by Blight Crusader
Tagged.com, which bills itself as the “third-largest” social networking site in America, is being sued by the state of New York for “deceptive email marketing practices and invasion of privacy,” due to their practice of what amounts to chain-email. When an unsuspecting new user signed up for the site, Tagged would mine their address book and send out a message to everyone in it which told the recipients that their friend had posted photos on the site for them to view. No photos actually existed, and if anyone tried to view them, they were forced to sign up themselves — which led to their address book being mined, in a viral chain reaction.
New York’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, was not amused. From the text of the statement he posted on the official New York A.G.’s site today:
Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that he has served the social networking site Tagged.com (“Tagged”) with formal notice that his office intends to sue the company for deceptive email marketing practices and invasion of privacy. According to Cuomo’s notice of intent, Tagged devised an illegal plan to lure new members and artificially inflate traffic on its site. Consumers who visited Tagged were tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts, which the company then used to send millions of promotional emails. Tagged disguised these solicitations to make them appear as if they were coming from a personal contact, when they were actually spam.
Between April and June this year, Tagged sent tens of millions of misleading emails to unsuspecting recipients stating that Tagged members had posted private photos online for their friends to view. In reality, no such photos existed and the email was not from their friends. When recipients of these fraudulent emails tried to access the photos, they were forced to become a new member of Tagged. The company would then illegally gain access to their personal email contacts to send more fraudulent invitations.
“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical – and illegal – behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books, and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”
Tagged made their invitational emails appear to have been sent directly from members’ personal email accounts, instead of from Tagged.com. The emails falsely stated that “[name] sent you photos on Tagged.” If a member had added a personal image to the website, Tagged also included that picture in these fraudulent email solicitations. Many consumers were unaware that Tagged accessed their email contact lists.
The Attorney General’s lawsuit would seek to stop Tagged from engaging in these fraudulent practices and would seek fines from the company. Tagged temporarily suspended its email marketing campaign in June, in response to user complaints and criticism, but had already sent over 60 million of the deceptive emails to consumers worldwide.
Now, social networking spam is bad enough without the site itself generating it, one would think. Tagged’s response, from a Wall Street Journal story seemed like a pretty weak defense (but then, the practice itself seems pretty indefensible, when you get right down to it:
Tagged.com, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2004, last month posted an apology and blamed the problem on a new registration process that it discontinued in early June.
But the company Thursday denied accessing users’ personal address books or sending emails without their permission, suggesting that users accidentally gave their consent during the registration process.
“We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends,” said Greg Tseng, Tagged’s chief executive, in a prepared statement.
“We are truly sorry for any inconvenience or frustration that these people experienced.”
Mr. Tseng described the announcement by Mr. Cuomo as “disheartening.”
. . .
A spokeswoman for Tagged.com, however, said the process was very similar to those used by other sites, and required new registrants to actively import email addresses of people that could be contacted by the service.
But Tagged.com said it took action quickly when it became clear from user complaints that consumers weren’t realizing they had authorized messages to be sent to their contacts as part of the registration process.
“We immediately stopped using this registration process, before being contacted by the Attorney General’s office,” Mr. Tseng wrote in the statement.
Tags: social networking, spam, Tagged
