Spam from your Social Networking Site?

My inbox this week was flooded with email invitations to join a new social networking site, Quechup. Numerous people were caught off-guard when after joining Quechup, every person in their email address book was spammed with Quechup invitations--without their permission.

It's a common practice on many social networking sites, from Twitter to Facebook, to have an option to check your email address book to see what other people you know are also on the site, with the option to invite friends to use the service. The difference with Quechup is when users enter their name and email password, Quechup emails invitations without the permission of the user. What's worse is the messages are personlized with the name of the user, making it appear that the spam came from the new Quechup user. This has caused more than a few problems for people including this blogger whose Google account was suspended as a result of his Quechup "invitations."

Mashable.com's post discusses the controversial issue of how social networking sites solicit new users. As the case of Quechup illustrates, users need to be wary of their privacy on social networks, especially when revealing personal information, such as one's contact list. This post mentions a related ZDnet study that investigates other social services that mine data from public social networking profiles. While such practices might be legal, users of social networking sites must be wary of the type and amount of information they make freely available on such sites. In the meantime, Quechup has a lot of "quech-ing up" to do to win back the trust of its potential users.

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