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August 14th, 2009, 13:21 GMT · By

Tagged Sued for Shady Email Practices

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The social network's shady behaviour lands it a lawsuit
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Tagged.com finds itself in even more legal trouble after two California residents have sued the social network for allegedly tricking them into sharing their email contacts and using those contacts for false advertising. Miriam Slater of Santa Barbara and Sara Golden of Los
Angeles who filed the suit are seeking class-action status and are claiming the site violated several US laws like the Stored Communications Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Tagged is a San Francisco-based social network that used tactics that some found misleading for gaining more users. As a new user would sign up for the product they would be required to fill in their email and the password to the email account. By signing up they also allowed the company to retrieve their email contacts and use their account to send out invites to all of them making them look like they were from the users themselves and not an automated message.

Last month, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo threatened to start legal proceedings against the company saying it “stole the address books and identities of millions of people.” He also said that as much as 60 million emails of this type had been sent by the company over time and was looking to block it from engaging in similar behavior while also seeking a fine.

In this latest suit Slate claims that she gave the site her email address and password in order to view the photos mentioned in the email she first received. She had no intention or knowledge of the fact that she was in fact signing up for the site or that her contacts would be sent emails on her behalf. Golden said she also joined the site after receiving an invitation coming from Slate. Tagged didn't comment on the new lawsuit but had recently acknowledged that the tactics were confusing some users and has since stopped sending this kind of invitations. 

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READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: Eric on 14 Aug 2009, 20:13 UTC reply to this comment

Frankly, Tagged deserves to be sued out of business. I'm sure that someone raised their hand at one of the meetings where this tactic was being discussed and said "This is a horrible idea" but clearly their voice wasn't heard.

I understand that in the social networking business, you have to be creative to stay alive in the vast shadows of Facebook and Myspace...but that doesn't mean its okay to ignore common sense and trick users into spreading things like a virus.

My guess is that they knew this tactic would eventually lead to litigation, but they simply didn't care and hoped that, legal or not, it would help them become large enough that legal fees and issues would be worth it. Basically, they looked for a very effective, clever way to send spam. Because they likely knew their tactic would lead to this legal battle but chose to exploit it anyway, they really do deserve to be put out of business.

This should also be a good security lesson for everyone: never give your password to ANY third party unless you are absolutely, 100% sure you know what they are going to use it for.

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