If apologizing to friends, family, classmates, colleagues, acquaintances, and anybody who's ever graced your email inbox is your thing, then signing up with "social networking" site Tagged.com is the way to go. Or, you could tell the FTC the site's founder is still up to his old tricks.
This morning I received an email from someone on staff at the graduate school I attend, inviting me to join Tagged. Emails from this person are generally official program ones. For example, she would likely inform me of changes made on
But then things got more personal. I didn't count the pages, but they were numerous, that I had to keep clicking "pass" after viewing. Each page was offering some different promotion or survey, and each page asked for some deeply personal information: cell phone number this time, required, and my mother's maiden name. Eventually, one can exit the spam labyrinth, but you have to be pretty resolved to believe that this isn't the same page over and over, and that you won't exit the loop until you sign up for something. I'm stubborn, so that's to my credit. Finally, voila, I'm at my Tagged profile page where I can do all the same things I can do at any number of other social networking sites on the Internet. (Yawn.)
But what a weird choice of social networks my grad school had made!
I checked my email, and there was the apology. She hadn't meant to send an invitation to everybody she'd ever met via email. Doh! I promptly canceled my Tagged account and when they had the nerve to say they were "bummed" and asked me why, I gave them a (very vulgar) piece of my mind.
My email password has also been changed.
It's surprising Tagged didn't ring a bell--this is my beat, after all--and a little research showed that I probably had seen the name before among lists of social networking also-rans that weren't MySpace, Facebook, or Bebo. But Tagged claims to have 70 million members. Why hadn't I heard more?
other complaints online via numerous Wikipedia's entry is far from flattering, labeling Tagged.com a phishing scheme. Security firm Allen Morgan at Authentication and Online Trust Alliance website to see mention of another company he founded, called Jumpstart Technologies. Interesting it wasn't mentioned on violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
From the FTC's March 2006 press release about Jumpstart:
“These defendants intentionally used personal messages as a cover-up for commercial messages," said Lydia Parnes, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Deceptive subject lines and headers not only violate the CAN-SPAM Act, but also consumer trust.”The FTC’s complaint alleges that Jumpstart offered free movie tickets to consumers in exchange for the names and e-mail addresses of five or more of their friends. Jumpstart then sent them commercial e-mails with the consumer’s e-mail address in the “from” line and a seemingly personal “subject line,” such as, “Hey,” “Happy Valentine’s Day,” “Happy New Year,” “Movie time. Let’s go.,” or “Invite.” Jumpstart also made it look as if the consumer had written the message text. In this way, Jumpstart’s commercial e-mails circumvented certain spam filters and were opened by consumers who thought they contained personal correspondence.Well, we can see that the regulatory slap on the wrist really meant something to Tseng and persuaded him to change his business model.
In the comments of one blog post complaining about Tagged, someone suggests readers contact the site's investors to complain. Likely, that won't do much—spam is lucrative. We suggest consumers concerned about privacy and spam fill out thisSuggest a Correction
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