Quechup and Spam

The social networking site, "Quechup" is taking some serious heat for its viral marketing efforts. While their activities seem unethical, a lot of the blame points towards users lacking basic internet skills.

Upon signing up it asks for:

So what's Quechup do with your info?

It logs into your email or instant messaging account then proceeds to spam Quechup invites out to everyone in your contacts or buddy list.

If Quechup gets lucky, some of your friends are as dumb as you are - and they do the same. The resulting phenomena looks a lot like a worm, except users are actively participating in spreading the insanity.

Since the email apparently comes from someone the receiver has communicated with before, there's a good chance the their mail blocker will let the message through unfiltered.

Quechup of course tells you it's going to do all this in the fine print. However, no one ever reads the fine print - including me. The lesson here is that users need to be savvier about giving away their account information.

Just because users only provide their info to Quechup doesn't mean it will stay there. What if Quechup went bankrupt and sold the account information in the process? For that matter, websites are hacked regularly, and the information could fall into the wrong hands that way.

Imagine what a spammer could do with a million verified email accounts including passwords. Suddenly, spam could be emanating from any email address which ever signed up for Quechup. Not pretty, but it could increase the demand for Outlook spam software.

So on that note - go ahead and sign up for Quechup. We could use the business.

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