Social Media Identity Theft, in itself, has become a big problem. Having the networking site itself, communicating, as if it was the person, is completely irresponsible. It looks like the Attorney General’s Office believes it is criminal, as well. Part of the problem is how much individuals reveal about themselves, on any of the Social Media sites. People just give criminals the opportunity to put a profile together to better impersonate or victimize them. A challenge to this problem is how many Social Media Networking sites are being added daily and users truly knowing what their privacy and security policies are. Most people just jump on and share. Now throw on top of that mix some Synthetic Identity issues, where there is not really a true individual to begin with, and see what cooks up. Law enforcement certainly will have challenges even figuring out “Who’s on First” and how that Social Networking website handled Mr. First’s information, to begin with.

There are too many unethical web sites and developers out there. An example will be a good way to try to curb this type of abusive computing behavior. There are so many trap doors in the Social Media Networking arena, that even this activity seems to defy my better judgement.

Can you imagine if LinkedIn just started sending out messages to all of our personal contacts in our names? We would get fingered as spammers, and would likely upset some of our friends or colleagues who have no interest or use for LinkedIn.

On today’s Internet, social networking is increasingly becoming the norm, and privacy controls in my opinion are not given sufficient focus, nor are they easy to configure for the average user. Small print is just that – small – and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that it is generally ignored by users signing up for a new service. It’s easy to say it’s the user’s responsibility and to some extent you would be right, but the provider of a service should have the responsibility to look after its customers by making it clear what they will and won’t do.

Tagged.com have neglected that responsibility.

I think Tagged.com should get what they deserve, which is to be shut down. I received a wave of their spam from some unsuspecting family members and it was quite annoying.

Being of a mindset that privacy should be taken more seriously, suits of this nature are a necessary activity. Many companies are still paying lip service to privacy. Consumers, come to think of it, as well until there is an identity theft. I would ask whether this would prompt companies to be more proactive in promoting good privacy practices

Did tagged really send them out “under the users’ names with out their knowledge”? Or did it state this in the T&C’s but users did not pay attention?

tagged could not get the mailing list without a proactive action by the user. This is why I do not link my mailing list to linkedin. I search for each person I want instead.

It is not for me to expose someone else’s e-ddress if they are not already here. This is one of the reasons I started a separate e-ddress just for linkedin. It is now getting unsolicited e-mails asking me to join plaxo, taggged and others from people I only know because of accepting a link here. I have no interest in these other sites and do not want them to even have any of my other e-ddresses.

If someone is so unaware of why a site is asking for every e-ddress they can get their hands on, I hope they do not have any of my more private ones! How can people be so clueless?

Oh ya…. that’s right.