Today, the story broke about the New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo suing Tagged.com . This situation has a personal element.
Brad Stone‘s New York Time (NYT) article today “New York Attorney General Sues Tagged.com” begins:
“Turns out our recent article on the spammy social network Tagged.com …”
Rafat Ali‘s paidcontent.org article today “Social Net Tagged Getting Tagged…Er…Sued By NY AG” begins:
“High time someone asked harder questions: Tagged …”
Laura Northrup‘s The Consumerist article today “NY Attorney General Unfriends Tagged.com, Files Lawsuit“:
“… social networking contact-spamming site Tagged.com. …”
As you can see by how those stories start, there is a lot of bad will for Tagged.com. Some weeks ago I was researching this very topic, but did not find the recent Alina Tugend NYT “Typing In an E-Mail Address, and Giving Up Your Friends’ as Well” article about Tagged.com nor did I find Tagged CEO Greg Tseng response on their blog. In my web searches these were buried by years of complaints about Tagged.com phishing and spamming.
I guess, I should go back to the beginning. June 6th, I receive a Tagged.com invite from a dear older family friend,
“[redacted] sent you photos on Tagged Want to see the photos? Please respond or [redacted] may think you said no
“
Clicking the link did not take me to photos, but instead to a registration form. The registration did not allow proceeding without providing my login to Gmail, and every person in my address book was selected by default to invite before proceeding. ((Another email account, that I don’t use publicly also received the email invite, and since then — coincidentally I hope — has now received it’s first spam email.))
Oh no! I immediately let the family friend know that they signed up for what seemed to be a phishing and spam site and that it was important to change her passwords. The friend was really upset and explained that she received the invite from a professional friend of hers, and was worried for everyone else that might have received it from her.
I didn’t think of it much again until some weeks later, when she described still being bothered by it, how embarrassing it was, and that she didn’t feel confident using the web any more. She had removed all her photos from Flickr. So, I decided to take another look at Tagged.com and that takes us to all the complaints I described finding above.
I checked the Tagged.com’s site, and was surprised to find the board of directors included Reid Hoffman, Founder & CEO of LinkedIn,1 and two members of the Mayfield Fund: Raj Kapoor and Allen Morgan. All people I deeply respect.
I scratched my head and tried to look at the situation from different angles. I discovered that Tagged.com has rave reviews from a young audience. That the pushy, in your face Tagged.com experience works for this young audience. I guessed that Tagged.com might be tacky enjoyable like MySpace is to many young people.
So, I decided to reach out to CEO Greg Tseng through a mutual connection on LinkedIn. The email took about a week to get to him, and July 7th I received a thoughtful and apologetic response.
The timing of the lawsuit seems really unfortunately for Tagged.com as it seems like they were already in the process of cleaning up their act. I fear that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence against them, and any lawsuit won’t go well.
Update: Read my next article “Gmail’s Opportunity to Help Protect Against Tagged.com Mistake, Spam, and Phishing“. I think it’s at least as interesting part of the story.
- Disclosure: I work fairly regularly with the LinkedIn team as I’m involved in hosting their blog as part of our WordPress.com VIP hosting. [↩]
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It seems many other social networks including Facebook has adopted the approach to search through user’s email contacts, but they are not as aggressive as Tagged.com. I think providing a choice before “do you want to invite your friends to join ?” and the default opt-out unless user clicks checkbox to select contacts is acceptable.
Good points Hailin. I think one of the challenges is that our email address books includes a lot more than just our friends — particularly when, for example, gmail automatically adds anyone that you’ve emailed. And my email contacts expectations are a little different than contacts on a social networking site. Email contacts don’t expect (or want) invites to other social networking sites.
By limiting the number of people you can invite from email contacts at one time — and better yet, not having all the email addresses directly exposed in the first place — it is a better experience for everyone. This is what I recommend Google do in Gmail’s Opportunity to Help Protect Against Tagged.com Mistake, Spam, and Phishing.
Tagged.com not only does spamming, they use sock puppets (fake IDs) and astrotrufing (fake “grass roots” support) to flood any forum that is justly critical of tagged.com with simple minded posts in support of tagged.com. These posts are all made within a few minutes of each other and have a suspiciously similar style. Consider yourself fortunate they overlooked you. So why suspect Tseng and tagged.com of such fraud? The facts are as follows: 1) Tagged.com was named the “World’s most annoying Web site” by Time magazine for the scope of the latest barrage of fraudlent spam e-mail . As you mention, the NY State Attorney General has filed suit against tagged.com for it fraudulent practices. 2) Greg Tseng has a history of fraudulent e-mail campaigns on the Internet. Do a search on his name and crushlink, an e-mail scam from back in 2002 wherein people were sent fake e-mails that said, “Someone has a crush on you”. To find out who it was, you had to give clushlink over 20 pingable e-mail addresses, which would then all receive an e-mail telling them “Someone has a crush on you”. These e-mail addresses harvested under false pretenses were then sold to spammers. 3) Later, in 2004 I believe, his company paid a $900,000 fine for fraudulent spamming for FreeFlixTix. Tseng is a serial fraud and spammer with a track record of bad behavior that stretches over seven years and three separate companies. That Reid Hoffman, Raj Kapoor & Allen Morgan would be involved with him speaks ill of them. Either they have not exercised due diligence before forming their associations, or their ethics are appallingly lapse.
as a person who had exactly what the previous email stated-harrassed by tagged itself, I have documented proof that tagged is singling me out because I am doing research on the unethical Tseng. I have reported porn on tagged and those profiles are still there while the one I used to report it was deleted.
did you know that one of tsengs personal email accounts list his name as “gfuc yu”
I have so much documented evidence and the links that go to it. If anyone is interested in this info I can be contacted at [email protected]
would love to hear from any attorney who is after tagged.com