Is Facebook using invitation email addresses for sign-up spam?
By Paul Nikkel
Digg it Facebook is one of those “web 2.0″ brands that everyone seems to trust and thus not think twice when giving them personal details and info. However, the public outrage over the Terms of Service update (that would have given Facebook perpetual ownership of your data and photos) and the year old Beacon debacle (that would track and publish your shopping habits) have done some damage to Facebook’s privacy reputation.
It now seems that Facebook are using the email data collected from friend invites to later spam those addresses with more Facebook marketing emails.
I have a personal email account that has received a few Facebook invites from friends over the years. I’ve never signed up to Facebook from or with that email so there is no connection between Facebook and that personal email except from those old invites. I have never given Facebook that email or signed up to any of their services with that email address.
Despite never giving the info to Facebook I’ve now received an email from them titled, “Check out photos of your friends on Facebook”. The email then goes on:
“Hi,
Here are just a few things your friends have been up to while you were gone:
{Photos and status updates from those who sent previous invitations}
Facebook is a great place to keep in touch with friends, post photos, videos and create events. But first you need to join! Sign up today to create a profile and connect with the people you know.
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
To sign up for Facebook, follow the link below:”
The email does have an unsubscribe link at the bottom but does it matter? If I have never given Facebook my email, I have never opted-in nor had the chance to opt-out of these Facebook marketing emails.
Does anyone know if this type of unsolicited marketing email is even legal in the UK? Does anyone inviting friends realise that Facebook are going to continually spam them for months or years?
Thanks to appscout for the pic
Posted in Personal privacy, marketing April 15th, 2009 | 23 Comments
feral trolley of the week
Don’t expect the information commissioner to do anything about it.
How about those small ads to the side of each page which in some cases seem to know how old I am? E.g. “Are you 38? Get yourself a girlfriend. Visit such and such dating site.”
So Facebook are sharing my personal details with their advertisers as well. My info page doesn’t even mention which year i was born as I’ve made that private but Facebook give that private detail away regardless!
facebook allows adverisers to target particular demographics. so an advertiser will say ’send this ad to men aged 30-35 who live in london and are single’ and facebook will target them.
Dear facebook,
I have discovered several severe holes in the site that should have been caught by
Quality Assurance, but somehow have slipped through and remain on the site.
These are not security holes, but holes that are liable to
slowly erode the face of facebook and dissolve confidence in the product by
many members and most hurtful, non-members.
In the invite feature of fb, I accidentally accepted the fb
feature to invite every single person that I have every emailed, CCed, or BCed
in my entire life from Gmail. (hmm, a warning message would have been nice,
once clicked, surely I would not have wanted to do that.)
Once clicked, I immediately realized my mistake. After the initial
embarrassment of inviting my whole world, I got over it as “oh well, my
mistake.”
However, no daily email spam is sent out to these contacts, harassing
that they join! Many unpleasant folks have contacted me and are very irritated
at me and fb!
I found a way in fb to remove all of these accidental
invites, but it conveniently doesn’t seem to work correctly.
The following process/path I used and the error that I was
confronted with:
facebook > friends > invite friends > View all
invitations > Select: Not Yet Joined
:: Popup Delete Entries? “Are you sure you want to delete these 100
entries from your Invitation History?” Delete
Oops!
“Something went wrong. We’re working on getting this
fixed as soon as we can. You may be able to try again.” OK
Could somebody else or a team of people, try hard to
improve this site with very simple enhancements?
Update: fb requires you delete these invites one by one. Deleted.
However, here it is a week later and the weekly fb spam has been sent
out to all of the formerly invited contacts again!!! What a joke!
Horrible business practice!!
Just found out that if you use the Share button under a photo or something and give an e-mail address then that e-mail address will show up on the list of people you have invited to Facebook AND they will start to automatically send “Reminder: Jim invited you to join Facebook…” spam! I just wanted to share something, not invite the person to FB and certainly not have FB spam them!!!!
Scumbags…
Bastards! They are spamming all my 2000 contacts using my name! And there’s no way to talk with them. All user help is automatic. I think im gonna delete my account. There’s no other way, i’m really embarassed of being acused of spamming people.
[...] reported on Facebook’s email invitation spam before and now a Bitterwallet reader flags the info that Facebook have become even more aggressive [...]
Yep, just discovered Facebook is inviting people on my “behalf” who I never intended to invite. Grrrrrr. If it is going to send invitations without my consent, it could at least warn me !
I am having this exact problem! and its incredibly humilating as I have very important clients getting emailed from bloody Facebook saying I have asked them to join!! How dare they do this in MY name. Surely there must be some way to stop this. Its basically spamming in my name.
Also the worrying thing is how are they getting these email addresses? I mean, the people getting annoyed at me have nothing to do with my Facebook account. The only thing I can think of is when I have sent an email from Facebook to one person in particular saying look at my photos, Facebook have remembered this email address and then spammed it in MY name!! I will have to delete my account.. its the only way.
Facebook is also sending invites on my behalf to all of my contacts from gmail. It’s so embarrassing and I can’t figure out how to stop it. It’s making the FB experience pretty miserable for me and my contacts. Also, I feel like FB was less than upfront about how they’d take my contacts and invite ALL of them. I honestly feel tricked by FB in giving them access to my gmail account. If I would have known they’d start spamming everyone in my name I’d never have done it. This is a bad business practice and I feel embarrassed because people assume I’m dying for their “friendship”!
Ok here is what is happening, ifg you have a gmail acocunt but do not yet have faceboo,, gmail is giving out all the email addresses from every bit of any gmail you have ever sent or uloaded and facebook is matching this with the same information of existing facebook users and other gmail users and sending out invites.
I uploaded a 4 gig outlook pst file to gmail with over 10 years of data and guess what, people i sent emails to 7 years ago got a facebook invite from me and I dont even have a facebook account on this email.
I actually seeded the pst file with emails that come back to me and guess what i got the invityes.
It is now blatanntly obvuious that gmail and facebook are sharing email addresses.
Your privacy and that of others has noe been copromised.
[..]The email does have an unsubscribe link at the bottom but does it matter? [..]
Does unsubscribe link work? or even lock the account will FB stop spamming?
(. Every week it send a invitation email.
I’m really embarassed of spamming to some importance people.
I have the same problem. They are spamming all of my contacts; even the ones that are hidden multi-user adresses. I tried to create a fake new gmail account and now keep track if it send to the new, old or both of the accounts. Thinking of closing down my FB account.
This just happened to me today – I thought I was just inviting a couple of people from my Gmail contacts to be Facebook friends, but now Facebook has spammed EVERY SINGLE email address in my contacts list with this B.S. “Check out my photos in Facebook” message. It has already pissed off a few people and one of them is me! I’m going to set up some kind of auto-responder to apologize to people, but what a pain in the ass!
To any embarrassed FB Family and or interested other parties: I have the answer to all our now past questions & concerns about the spamming from FB on our prior unintentionally invited friends.
JUST go to FRIENDS then INVITE FRIENDS and once option is there just view all invited friends and from that list u can cancelled the invitation that has been sent before.
I’m just the messenger please use this info A.S.A.P. . . . if this information shall turn up to be redundant, please ignore.
PPL Help PPL
I’ve finally figured out how to stop this from happening: Friends > Invite friends> Import email adresses > “Facebook will not store your password. Learn More.” click “learn more” > Click “this page” > click “REMOVE”
I was still having this problem in 3/2010 – the above suggestions FINALLY got me there… one trick… look where you can do a dropdown to select “All”… but realize that only the 100 on the page will be selected… I was spamming the hell out of 236 people and fb wanted me to keep doing it… wankers. 3 times through of selecting all on the page and my hell was finally over.
awesome post, i’m gonna bookmark ya!
Problem is that FB has (once agin!) changed and there is not this dropdown option anymore. I htink I did find the solution by blocking FB as a third party site on my gmail account. See
https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=112802
finger crossed!
Actually, with the new FB go to:
home -> connect with friends (invite frineds to join FB) -> view all invites
then delate, page per page. I had 567 invitations pending … how embarrasing is that! :s
Does anyone know how often these “Reminders” are sent out? Once a month? Twice a year? Is there a pattern? Or, are they generated randomly?
In other words, how often was mytopclient@gemail.com getting my reminder to join facebook?
Do these automated reminders have a pattern?
THANK YOU!