Recently, my inbox has been bombarded with invites to Quechup, which purports to be a social networking site. It’s a familiar pattern, you sign up, and it offers to check your gmail contacts (which is everyone you’ve ever exchanged emails with) to see if they’ve already joined. Here’s the rub – it spams everyone in your address book WITHOUT ASKING YOU FIRST, and the process begins again.

The beauty of this approach is the email COMES FROM YOUR FRIEND! If you mark it as spam (as Julien suggests), you’ve marked your friend as spam, not the site. Ouch.

Update: Julien says gmail is smarter than I think it is. Score one for Julien, and Google…. But be careful with other email spam filters, they may not be as intelligent!

We’ve become so used to signing up for the “latest one” that the checking of email accounts for contacts is almost automatic. I regularly do it with services like Twitter and LinkedIn, so I guess I’m lucky these people aren’t tools like the people behind Quechup.

The invites I got were from people I knew and trusted like CC Chapman. I don’t want to single him out, but the post and comments are worth reading. If it weren’t for my iSP Videotron going down for multiple hours for the 3rd time this week, I’d have been duped too. As it was, I saw the warnings before I acted on the invites.

What surprised me was the “caliber” of people getting caught here. I’m talking very savvy folk, not your stereotypical 70-year-old this-guy-in-Nigeria-really-can-make-me-rich people.

Christopher Penn has labeled this a “TrustVirus”, and the term fits perfectly. There’s a huge opportunity for ne’er-do-wells too get canoe-fuls of valuable information just by abusing online trust. Chris points out that this was rather innocuous, at least it seems so right now. If iDate is a front for spam though, a lot of people are gong to get new email addresses soon.

Hopefully, the worst that will come out of this one is that it’s a wake-up call and a reminder to be REALLY careful when sharing information. Think about this experience the next time you blindly add “The Friend-Poke-Fart Generator” on facebook. When you just click on yes to let it see your information, you’re giving everything away – In fact, you’ve already lost the rights to anything you put on facebook. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the terms of use on facebook :

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof,

OUCH OUCH OUCH!!! How stupid have we become? That’s a great picture of you playing soccer with your kid, and soccer-ball Corp is super happy to be using it in a major print ad with you not getting a dime.

It’s time for us Social Media types to smarten up, or lose the right to bitch about it later… There’s no Norton Anti-Virus that will work for misplaced trust.

Posted by Bob on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 8:28 am.