Updated: Spam alert! Just say no to Quechup
If you get an invitation from a friend inviting you to join a social networking site call Quechup, delete it. Joining up and making the wrong decisions in the process could result in the site spamming everyone in your address book. Yes, Quechup is a genuine social network. But the way it acquires new members is questionable at best. When you accept an invitation and sign up, it asks you if you’d like to find other people who may be on it by scanning your e-mail address book for people who are in the service. If you use a Web-based e-mail account — Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo, for example — it asks for your login information. This is common to many social networks — Twitter will do this, for example. But Quechup goes one step further. It automatically sends an e-mail invitation to everyone in your address book, which looks as though it came from you. It does this without warning — essentially, spamming in your name.
Every now and then, I get duped into unknowingly doing something really stupid. So it was with Quechup. A couple of days ago, I got an email that appeared to be from Laurence Simon, inviting me to join Quechup. I’ve never been big on social networking sites, but I figured that this might be something interesting. So I clicked on the link, signed up, and neglected to deny access to my Gmail address book. Unbeknownst to me, Quechup hijacked my address book and apparently sent an invitation in my name to EVERYONE I’d ever sent an email to or received one from. Yes, you got that right- EVERYONE, including people I wouldn’t want to invite to gloat at my funeral. Yeah, I know better…but that didn’t seem to stop me.
It’s at this point that I feel the need to offer the humblest of apologies. If you received an unsolicited email that appears to from me, please accept my mea culpa. I’d offer to commit ritual suicide as a means of expressing my remorse, but that seems a bit overly dramatic. To say that this whole experience has soured me on Quechup in particular, and social networking sites in general, would be something of an understatement. It’s also forced me to become extremely cynical in how I approach emails even from people I trust. I think what upsets me most is the completely unethical manner in which Quechup has sought to grow it’s online community. Yes, I’m certain that they’ve been phenomenally successful in adding new members, but at what cost? If they’re willing to stoop this low, what else are they willing to do? These ethically-challenged maroons ought to be ashamed of themselves, but if you believe in karma as much as I do, you’ll understand that they’ll get their comeuppance eventually.
Yeah, I know…who’s the DUMB@$$ now??
