This morning, I received an invitation from a friend to join http://www.reunion.com/.
I like to discover new "networking" sites and the way they each have their own flavor. So I joined in.
The registration is nice and works as expected for a "corporate application". After all, a site that uses SSL and "TRUSTe CERTIFIED PRIVACY" must be in the right path, right?
The first thing I should have done is check the "web" for known privacy concerns or blogs that talk about it, but I didn't and shame of me, mea culpa.
Once registered I did what I like to do when I join a new "networking" site, use the contact discovery tool that most have. As you may know, it's a functionality that downloads the contacts from another web site (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, linkedin, facebook, etc.) and offers you a few options.
The first thing most applications will do is tell you which downloaded contacts are already registered and offer you to "connect" with them.
The second thing most applications will do is offer you too choose the "un-registered" users in order to send them an invitation to join. The better applications will give you the ability to customize the message these people will see. It's particularly useful when the site isn't in the same language as the contacts you're inviting. right?
Well, from my experience with reunion.com, the contact discovery utility is a virus or Trojan. The site sent an email to everyone in my downloaded contact list without asking me first !
To everyone that received the reunions invitation on my behalf, I'm sorry..... it won't happen again, trust me !
Shame on you reunion.com.
1 minute after finding out this problem, I unregistered from the site, hopping that the site was not a spamming site disguised as ligit site. Let's just say that I changed the password on the "contact list's web site" just in case.
Not impressed.
Pat