Today, for the third time in a week, I got three spam messages from Twitter users. All of them were now following me, and wanted me to follow them. All three were from Porno sites parading as Singles sites!
This is why I shut down my FaceBook page, Myspace page, and every other 3.0 technology that seemed to jump the shark! I try these out for sometime before judging how useful or not they are to me and I write about them somewhere.
Unfortunately, they seem to be victims of their own successes! Quite often, they open their platforms for third-party developers, and pretty soon you have SPAM generating applications proliferating from these very platforms!
Many of these third-party applications embed very innocent-looking questions somewhere in your interactions with them, and get your permission without you knowing it. They may then read your Contacts list and send invites to everybody on the list.
Can you imagine the embarassment of sending SPAM to your business contacts (or even personal ones, although the business ones are more embarassing, in my opinion!)? Many of them you may not have contacted or emailed in the last year or two?
I just shudder at the thought and went ahead and shut down many of my pages in the other 3.0 sites!
I guess, once you cross the threshold of early adopters, and get into the mainstream, a handful of people spoil it for the rest of us!
Unfortunate, but true!
Privacy is not something that I'm merely entitled to, it's an absolute prerequisite. Marlon Brando
You are so right! My Twitter account got hit on Friday night and all over the weekend - most of it porn spam. I spent hours deleting it all and then I got hit again. The weird thing is sometimes you don't even get the usual email saying someone is following you - you just find that your following count is up. Twitter needs a system like Facebook where you get an email asking if you would allow that person to become a follower and if, after checking their credentials, you don't authorise them they cannot follow you - it wouldnt be hard to do.