Anyone heard of "Tagged"?

[prr]

I got an e-mail last night from a woman I knew thirty years ago, or more precisely it was from her via "tagged@taggedmail.com" and it said that she had sent me some pictures. Figuring she quirkily decided to send me some photos from our childhood, I tried joining this "tagged" thing (I figured it was some photosharing site) and it was a whole complicated process, in the middle of which I gave up.

But not, apparently, before hooking tagged into every address in my e-mail addressbook. Luckily I was using my PITA account (which has people I don't know all that well), but several of these people have sent me pissed-off emails asking who the hell am I and what I doing sending them multiple spammy e-mails. I write back explaining, but I keep getting them. I'm sure some of these have gone to ex-girlfriends, Dopers I haven't spoken to in many years who hate my guts, etc. I don't relish the thought that these folks think I'm trying to get in touch with them after all these years.

So who the hell is tagged? From that name, it sounds like this is a giant game of "tag, you're it," a joke the idea of which is to capture as many unwary people's addressbooks as possible.

[Caught@Work]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged

You are so screwed.

[Baldwin]

Somebody told me I should sign up with that site; glad I didn't do it. Sounds worse than useless.

[CatInASuit]

It's yet another social networking site.

I was added by accident by a friend and went through half the sign up process a couple of years ago. I get emails every so often asking me to complete my profile and do I want to meet good looking, funky people in the area. Not to mention getting plenty of friend requests from spammers dumped into the account.

I log in every 6 months or so, just to see what extra widgets they have added.

[Exy]

I don't understand. How would it possibly get any email addresses you didn't deliberately enter into it?

[CatInASuit]

I don't understand. How would it possibly get any email addresses you didn't deliberately enter into it?

You don't have to enter any addresses because you can allow Tagged to access your online contact lists from hotmail etc and let them be added as contacts to your Tagged profile.

[Exy]

I don't understand. How would it possibly get any email addresses you didn't deliberately enter into it?

You don't have to enter any addresses because you can allow Tagged to access your online contact lists from hotmail etc and let them be added as contacts to your Tagged profile.

So wait, you just somehow click a button saying "Import my yahoo mail contacts" or whatever and it does it? It must at least need a password or something.

I guess that's a little devious but I wouldn't have fallen for it.

[susan]

LinkedIn is another culprit.

[PapSett]

Wow...how odd... I had never heard of this, and RIGHT after I read your post I got an e mail stating 'So-and-So wants to send you pictures from Tagged..."

Never heard of the person. I deleted without opening.

[Zuul]

Okay, I looked at the Wikipedia entry on this. Let me see if I've got this straight:

You get an email, claiming that someone you know has pictures for you. You go to this website to see said pictures, but must first sign up. In the process of signing up, you have to enter your email address and its password. Then everybody you've ever emailed ever gets sent an email...claiming that you have pictures for them. :dub:

Well. Now I know to add @taggedmail.com to my spam filters. Thanks.

[McNutty]

That's pretty much the gist of it. In case it's not obvious, you should never give your login information for one website or online service (e.g. gmail, hotmail, etc) to another website or online service. Too many companies will either willfully abuse the information, or accidentally abuse it in their misguided attempt to "help" you. LinkedIn is an example of the latter, in my opinion: I actually believe their "address book import" feature is (at least in part) an honest attempt to make the whole process of building your contact network easier. But there's no way in hell it's a good idea.

[Exy]

Back in the day they used to just send out spams saying "someone you know has a crush on you!" and you'd have to enter every email address you could think of and then it would spam them and so forth . . . it used to take social engineering, not just typing in a password.

[Cerowyn]

LinkedIn is another culprit.

Another culprit of what? I've been on LinkedIn for years, as have a great many of my business contacts, and I've never once received spam related to that site. Is there some controversy I'm missing?

[susan]

I get as many e-mails associated with LinkedIn as I do from Tagged from people who, when I alert them, have no idea that they are on LinkedIn or, if they do know, have no idea that it's sent a message to everyone in their address book. This kind of site has brought up ethics issues for some counselors who have client addresses in their address books and do not realize they're unwittingly sending a message to a client with a header like "DrSusan sends you a cold drink!" which is associated with a European social networking site that works the same way.