Tagged.com Sued

NY Times time reported New York’s attorney general – Andrew Cuomo intends to sue Tagged.com for deceptive email marketing practices and invasion of privacy.

Cuomo stated

“Tagged.com has stolen the address books and identities of millions of people. Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical — and illegal — behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

CEO Tagged.com Greg Tseng, in return to Cuomo’s statement issued an official statement in a blog post expressing disheartenment:

“Today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Cuomo is disheartening. Identify theft and invasion of privacy are very serious allegations and it is not accurate to portray Tagged, or any other social network, in this regard. As a social networking company, our membership is built on word of mouth. Friends invite their friends to join — this has been standard practice among all social networking sites for over five years. When our company tested a new registration process, we discovered that our “invite your friends” language was confusing. The registration drive generated some complaints and as a business that succeeds or fails based on word of mouth, we took every complaint very seriously. We immediately stopped using this registration process, before being contacted by the Attorney General’s office. In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission. We realize that some were confused and accidentally agreed to invite their friends. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience or frustration that these people experienced.”

According to him, Tagged has already temporarily suspended its email marketing campaign in June,and introduced a new signup process base on Tags and photograps sharing.And which increased the existing user base by 3 million people out of which they got more than 2000 complaints for unauthorized invitation.

And adding more it Tseng said that Tagged had stopped using the method before Cuomo contacted them.