Andrew Cuomo said he plans to sue the social networking Web site for deceptive marketing and invasion of privacy.<\/p>\n
“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo said in a statement. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their e-mail contacts for Tagged’s unethical – and illegal – behaviour.”<\/p>\n
Started in 2004 by Harvard math students Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith, Tagged calls itself a “premier social-networking destination”. The California-based company claims to be the third-largest social networking site after Facebook and MySpace, with 80 million registered users.<\/p>\n
Cuomo said Tagged acquired most of them fraudulently, sending unsuspecting recipients e-mails that urged them to view private photos posted by friends.<\/p>\n
The message read: “(name of friend) sent you photos on Tagged.”<\/p>\n
When recipients tried to access the photos, Cuomo said they would in effect become new members of the site – without ever seeing any photos. Recipients’ e-mail address books would then be lifted, the attorney general said.<\/p>\n
Tagged temporarily suspended its online campaign last month, in response to user complaints.<\/p>\n
E-mail and telephone messages from The Associated Press to the company were not immediately returned on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“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,” Cuomo said.<\/p>\n
The system was set up so that a user was asked whether the sender of the photos was a friend, then suggesting that if the recipient didn’t respond, the friend “may think you said no” (accompanied by a sad face icon).<\/p>\n
Any click resulted in the same thing, Cuomo said: Every person on a user’s contact list received an e-mail that again read, “(name of user) sent you photos on Tagged.” The site then released a flood of offers for everything from sweepstakes to other services.<\/p>\n
By the time a recipient realized there were no photos, it was too late.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, a box on the site’s home page still read: “NOW HIRING … click here.”<\/p>\n
The attorney general said a lawsuit would seek to stop Tagged from engaging in “fraudulent practices”.<\/p>\n