Quechup the spammer

Over the weekend, a lot of people got invites for a new service called Quechup. As with many web tools, the service asks to take a look at your address book to see how many of your friends are also on it – often social network services need a critical mass before they come useful to you.

Unlike many services thought, Quechup took it a step further – once it got access to your address book, it proceeded to email all your contacts with an invite from you. A fair number of people for caught out, such as CC Chapman and Hugh MacLeod. Because both of these are well respected, many of their contacts caught the spam as well. Bad, bad behaviour from this company, almost all posts are full of negativity about the product.

An sssumption by a service that they can do what they want with your data is bad practices in many jurisdictions and illegal in others. I’m pretty sure that in the UK this is against the Data Protection Act. Companies that act in such ways are not to be trusted – to a lesser extent this also covers those opt-in choices on registration forms that are preselected as yes. Would you trust a company that wants to get your data however, just because you miss clearing a box on a form?

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