Posts Tagged ‘Spam’

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Facebook Allows Users to Download Expanded Archive of Their Information (Inside Facebook)
The “Download Your Information” feature now includes catalogues of friend requests a users make, IP addresses they’ve logged in from and any previous names they’ve used, among other Facebook actions. This is in addition to the copy of photos, posts, messages, chat conversations, friend lists and other information that Facebook first made available for download in 2010. The New York Times Facebook, which is preparing for an initial public stock offering, most likely in May, has been trying to accommodate government officials in Europe, where privacy laws are more stringent than in the United States. Mashable The archive still doesn’t include your friends’ photos and status updates, other users’ personal info and comments you’ve made on other people’s posts. Facebook This feature will be rolling out gradually to all users and more categories of information will be available for download in the future. Read more

Remember those affiliate links on Pinterest that had everyone so worried about copyrights? It turns out that they actually protected us from spammers like Steve, who use hundreds of fake Pinterest accounts to sell products on Amazon.

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Visible Gains designed this infographic about effective ways to communicate over the Internet. From the looks of it, email is far from dead and here to stay.

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Once you install the app, which is free, it will continue to scan your Twitter account and notify you by direct message of any threats. BitDefender includes scanning on demand, so you can scan accounts before deciding to follow them.

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A couple of spam text messages hit my iPhone recently. So, I tweeted a question to AT&T Wireless’s Customer Care Twitter account to learn what advice they might offer. You can see the response in the screenshot above. AT&T’s advice to use the word STOP to block messages is, it turns out, specifically to deal with messages from Short Code numbers. However, AT&T provides ways to deal with other kind of text message spam on this web support page.
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Truthly, Privachi scatters users’ information online like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, so that not one online service, not even Privachi, knows everything about the user.

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“This year more than two hundred million people will find some form of virus or spam on their Facebook wall and inadvertently spread it to all their friends,” said Adams. “Using Protection blocks these viruses making it impossible for you to infect others.”

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With the tremendous rise in the popularity of smart phones, they have also become a prime target for cyber criminals. According to McAfee, the malware attacks on smart phones and other mobile devices connected to internet rose by 46 percent in 2010 to 967 threats, compared to 704 threats that McAfee registered on mobile devices in 2009.

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Today I received a press release from Reunion.com notifying me that they had successfully added a whopping 1.6 million new members in June, beating out LinkedIn according to comScore. This is nothing compared to the more 9 million added by Facebook in the same month but Reunion.com is in another class. So how did they get the boost in traffic?

As I’ve previously covered, Reunion.com spams the friends of everybody that joins the site. It encourages users to check their email contact list to see if their friends are on the site. If their friends aren’t on the site it automatically sends an email to their contact list without notifying the users. This is a standard tactic which has been used countless times including by Plaxo which initially grew their user base with aggressive spam tactics.

As I wrote earlier this month, this isn’t the only violation of privacy that Reunion.com has made. As one article put it, “Reunion.com’s privacy policy says the site ‘prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13.’ But that doesn’t address the site’s own data-gathering.”

There is a very good chance that all of these privacy violations, regardless of the company’s remarkable growth is going to result in a lawsuit. According to sources of mine, there are individuals that are looking to sue the company for overly aggressive marketing techniques. The funny thing is how public Reunion.com’s tactics are. Perhaps this is one thing that would protect them in court.

If you Google “Reunion.com”, the first page contains multiple articles referencing the company’s email spam tactics. Growth is great for the company but sacrificing user privacy and user trust to grow your company isn’t a solid long-term strategy.

Plaxo.com, the company acquired last week by Comcast for a rumored $160 million, was launched back in 2001. The company faced heavy criticism for aggressive spam techniques which used user contact lists to send out false invites to users. Reunion.com has decided to leverage a similar tactic in hopes of rapidly expanding their user base.

While the tactics have appeared to work (based on Alexa statistics), this strategy is not a long-term solution and is a quick way to lose users faster than you gain them. Take a look at the screenshot below from a search for “Reunion.com” on Summize. The majority of comments are from angry people complaining about how Reunion.com abused users’ trust.

Only one of the users thought it was a genuine email but chose not to respond to it because he prefers to communicate via Facebook and Twitter. Screw using Facebook to spread your website or application virally, you can import peoples’ Gmail contact list and spam the hell out of them! Honestly, this has to be one of the most misleading tactics for a website to leverage.

Following stagnant growth through February it appears that the site decided to take drastic measures. Unfortunately those measures are going to end up backfiring. Reunion.com staff: drop the spam tactics or witness a mass exodus from your site. Then again I’d guess that the exodus has already begun taking place as users move to Facebook.

Have you received these emails? Do you see any benefit of using these tactics?

Sample Email 1

Sample Email 2

Twitter Search Screenshot