Who Tagged Who???

July 2009

Tagged site stole identities. New York’s attorney general charged on July 9 that Tagged.com stole the identities of more than 60 million Internet users worldwide, by sending e-mails that raided their private accounts. The attorney general said he plans to sue the social networking Web site for deceptive marketing and invasion of privacy. “This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” the attorney general said in a statement. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged’s unethical, and illegal, behavior.” Started in 2004 by Harvard math students, Tagged calls itself a “premier social-networking destination.” The California-based company claims to be the third-largest social networking site after Facebook and MySpace, with 80 million registered users. The attorney general said Tagged acquired most of them fraudulently, sending unsuspecting recipients e-mails that urged them to view private photos posted by friends. When recipients tried to access the photos, the attorney general said they would in effect become new members of the site, without ever seeing any photos. Recipients’ e-mail address books would then be lifted, the attorney general said.