Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

I received an invite this morning from a system called Quechup from someone I met yesterday at Office 2.0. Luckily, Luis Suarez aka elsua had twittered it negatively, so I was very cautious.

To quote Dwight Silverman:

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.

Googling confirms the bad press:

To me, this is Phishy :

phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques.^[1] Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. [Wikipedia]

In this world, trust is everything. Most people are trustworthy: if they err, it’s seldom through malicious intent, rather bad judgment. But when sites overstep the mark, and refuse to take corrective steps, the world needs warning.

Maybe bad press is Quechup’s owner (iDate) intention. After all, bad publicity is still publicity, and once they hit a certain limit they can change a policy, no skin off their nose. Well, I wonder how they’d like so much spam? The site owners have their site registration details public in the domain name registry:

They’ve also got a US address, in Las Vegas.

This led me to http://www.idatecorp.com/management-team.php who’s bio’s read like those of decent people that value their reputation. Are their http://www.idatecorp.com/advisors.php (Loeb & Loeb LLP, Ronald J. Stauber, Inc.) doing a good job? It doesn’t seem that Quechup even conform to iDate’s own privacy policy

iDate Corporation Privacy Policy

This site is owned and operated by iDate Ltd. Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us. At iDate, we want to make your experience online satisfying and safe.

If users have questions or concerns regarding this statement, they should first contact iDate by sending an e-mail to privacy@idatecorp.com.

Request and Address Please send notices by care of e-mail to: legals@idatecorp.com

Maybe someone local would like to pay them a visit? Or send their privacy or legals internal teams or council a few carefully chosen words?

World, be warned. iDateCorp, get smart or be damned: your Quechup policy is splattering your advisory teams, as well as yourselves.

Technorati : phishy, quechup

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 8:08 am and is filed under Social Media, Organizational Transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.