Don’t Do This
It should be basic common sense, but this issue is coming up again and again. Service X asks for your login details for service Y. Two things:
- Don’t provide them
- Walk away from service X
The latest uproar caused by people not following the above advice centres around book-centric social networking site Shelfari (I’m not linking to it - try LibraryThing instead), as highlighted yesterday by Andrew Savikas.
Like many sites, Shelfari asked for a new user’s Gmail account details and promptly used that to trawl their Gmail account and spam everybody they’d ever corresponded with. Another recent example of this is Quechup, but the problem goes way back to the days before “Web 2.0″ - remember Plaxo spam, anyone? While the victims of this are always rightfully furious over the whole thing, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that they enabled it (and potentially much worse) to happen in the first place.
There will be those who see the benefits in doing this kind of thing, but make no mistake, they’re seeing big ones for them and not a minor ‘import your contacts’ convenience for you. They will talk of transparency, honesty and the “right way” to do it. While it’s probably true that most are not going to do anything so blatently and visibly offensive as Shelfari, there are no guarantees as to what else may happen, whether deliberate or accidental. More importantly the very idea that you would give your login details for one service to another is so downright dangerous and stupid that the presence of ’safe’ examples is a bad thing in itself.
It’s never acceptable to ask for the details, or to give them. Just say no, kids.
November 14th, 2007 at 15:21
Ooh - Grange Hill all over again. “Where is Tucker Jenkins, boy????”, “He’s in the toilet doing some crack cocaine sir”