Agriya

1. New Tricks at the Social Media Hubs to get your Address Book

   sujata on January 16th, 2010

   Tags: social network

   It must be really important to new websites and established social media giants alike to get at your address book, to mine your contact list. Facebook and Twitter for example, ask you upfront if you would like to open your e-mail account to their view to help you identify which friends have accounts on their services. But they use sneakiness too. For example, once you let Facebook peek into your contacts, it will gather all your references and send messages to all of them with your name on the subject line with an invitation to them to pay you a visit on Facebook. It makes them think that you personally sent out the message, when in fact it was just an automated Facebook message that you had no idea was going out. Facebook can also be unnecessarily complicated when you want to get your name off the mailing list.

   If these are the tactics the big boys have to adopt, consider what one will need to do if one is an up and comer, like WeGame.com. If a sign-up to WeGame.com gives them his contacts list, the website will proceed to send the misleading e-mail to every one of those contacts, with a message that asks them by personal invitation, to see some of your photographs on WeGame.com. When you click on the link, you will be taken to the site, but you will be asked to enter your e-mail password, for “identification purposes”. That of course is just what they need to do to get your contacts list and do the same thing all over again to everyone on it.

   It is not uncommon for a website to ask you for your e-mail address and password for legitimate purposes. All of Google’s services ask you for your Gmail password for example. But it looks like these day, this model is being exploited for spam created by legitimate websites. It looks like we will need to go back to the old model where you just do not give out your e-mail and password anywhere at all, and just create a new one for each website afresh.

   Related Posts:

   • Which Outlet Serves a Business Better – Twitter or Facebook
   • Keeping Ahead of 25,000 Facebook Viruses and Scams
   • Twitter and FaceBook Search: The Latest Move in the Google vs. Bing Match?
   • Social Networking When Things do not go as Planned
   • Facebook Tips You Never Knew Whom to Ask

   No Comments » - Share This

   

   Blogs :

   Social Media News

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 5:42 am and is filed under Social Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Please use your real name when posting comments.