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 BlackBoard, where the user interface is about as intuitive as Braille at a drive-through ATM. It’s not unlikely, then, after enough complaints, that the program would decide on a different online community.
I hope that’s enough justification for my own stupidity as I ignored the trail of red flags leading me through Tagged’s signup process. I trusted the person sending me the mail enough to give it the benefit of the doubt and some information, and instead of my usual procrastination and skepticism about things like this, I proceeded hastily enough to miss the subsequent email of apology from the same source.
I wasn’t completely duped, though. Even if I did provide my Gmail password (this isn’t too uncommon when merging accounts, signing up for social media services, etc.), I didn’t allow Tagged to email my entire contact list it had imported. My entire contact list, just like everybody’s, is vast and includes not just friends, family, coworkers, and classmates, but also professional acquaintances, and even some people I generally despise (and the feeling’s mutual, I must contend). Instead of having to unselect hundreds of people one by one, Tagged, to its credit, allowed me to unselect the whole batch.
At least I hope that worked, because it’s not so clear if Tagged can be trusted. Still thinking this was for school purposes, I continued on through the sign-up process where I discovered, to my extreme discomfort, there were required information fields demanding personal information like my home address and my phone number. I wasn’t born yesterday, so I cursed my graduate school a little and told Tagged I lived at 1234 Nunyabizness Lane and gave them the number for the local Wal-Mart, if they would like to reach me. (Wouldn’t it be creepy if I were paged next time I went in there?)
Tagged knew that wasn’t a real street, so I changed it to the address of Ashland, the estate of “The Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay, where they could speak with the Congressman’s ghost, if they liked.
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?
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
Fair Game (2010)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Iron Man 2 (2010)
The Last Airbender (2010)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I (2010)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
Robin Hood (2010)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
The A-Team (2010)
The Spy Next Door (2010)
It’s not so hard to find other complaints online via numerous blog posts on the web, and Wikipedia’s entry is far from flattering, labeling Tagged.com a phishing scheme. Security firm Symantec has a forum post about them dating back to 2007, and doubts they are phishing for financial information, just personal information they can sell to third parties so Tagged’s valued members and everybody they know can be spammed and telemarketed to oblivion.
I went back to the site to see who was behind it. Usually, these companies have a shady history and I expected to see a company similar to Zango (fined by the feds) or Intermix, the checkered-past (and fed-fined) company behind MySpace. The pedigrees of the site founders and the venture capitalists funding it were actually very impressive and, dare I say, reputable. They hailed from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Oxford. The board of directors were associated with other big-name Internet and tech ventures like LinkedIn, PayPal, Apple and Fujitsu. They were backed by Allen Morgan at Mayfield, who’s backed Jobster, JotSpot, Snap, and Tribe.net.
With these resumes and portfolios, was I (and everybody else steamed about Tagged.com) just overreacting and assuming the worst? The mailing address was still worrisome: a PO box in San Francisco. Founder Greg Tseng’s bio on the management page seemed as benign as it was impressive. He also founded Avivon, which is difficult to find much info about, and a discount textbook seller at Harvard called flyingchickens.com. A PhD physicist, his list of accomplishments at Harvard and Standford is commendable—and hey!, a publication credit at Science.
You would have to find a brief speaker bio at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance website to see mention of another company he founded, called Jumpstart Technologies. Interesting it wasn’t mentioned on Tagged.com’s management page. That might be because Jumpstart was fined nearly a million dollars in 2006 by the Federal Trade Commission for 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 this FTC complaint form instead.
