None of us have responded to the e-mails or signed up for the service, but these companies are STILL harvesting our address books. I’m hoping since I have been using only web-based e-mail for months now that these spybots haven’t spoofed my address to all the people in my OE address book, but I don’t know. Nobody’s told me about receiving anything from me, anyway.

As for software to prevent attacks, I love Ad-Aware. For a firewall, I recommend Zone Alarm, and for anti-virus I recommend AVG, which is available at http://www.grisoft.com . Add to that my use of Gmail instead of anything downloaded into Outlook Express, and I think I’m doing pretty well.

Also worth trying, although you have to pay a few dollars for it if you want to use multiple accounts, is Mailwasher. It will just download the headers for you, even from Hotmail accounts, and you can make it generate false “bounce” messages so the spammers think your address doesn’t exist. Very cool. I’ve used it on people that have harassed me online, where I’ve blocked them from MSN Messenger and they continue harassment via e-mail. I’ll just set the bounce on them, and they think I never received their message. Sweet!

I think you have some valid concerns there about spywares, adwares and spamming.

Spywares and adwares will be installed quietly without our knowledge at all. The next thing you know, your machine will be sending out some information collected from our PC through spywares and our PC will also be getting unwanted ads popping up through the hidden adwares. PC performance will also suffer.

For more options, you can go to Microsoft to get a beta version of their anti-spyware software.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

As for plaxo, friendster, Hi5, etc, they however, will spam you with request to join and numerous reminders updating information, etc. However, I believe they will not sell your information to 3rd parties as they are bound by Truste.org for privacy adherence. If there is a complaint, you can actually send your complaint to Truste.org. In case of Plaxo, they are trustE certified.
http://www.truste.org/consumers/watchdog_complaint.php

I guess you must be wondering why I might be interested in this particular topic. I am a Malaysian, currently embarking on similar concepts like Hi5, Plaxo, Ryze, etc. This concept is very much related to a sociology concept called social networking. There is a boom in US for websites with such concepts, especially relating to weak ties concept. And a lot of VCs in US are actually funding start-ups doing this. For this, check out this website – http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/

The main idea here is that there is a viral effect that allows you to create a huge network of members in a very short time. And it is relying on your exisitng relationship and friendship. The idea is that you can meet new friends (potential dates), jobs, business contacts, spread of new fads,etc. through this type of network So, you bound to receive more of this type of emails in future.

Hence, you have Plaxo for update of latest addresses of friends, Hi5 and Friendster for meeting new friends through your existing friends, birthdayalarm for birthday reminders, Ryze for Business Networking, etc.

In fact, Instant Messenger such as yahoo messenger and msn messenger are considered a social networking tool, only they are not seen intrusive. Other form of loose concept of social networking is like ahmoi.com and match.com.

Ok, straight to the point. We are building a concept called Personal Relationship Management tool. It will be built into the browser (at the moment is only in Internet Explorer). It aims to help you to manage your friendship and family ties, build quality relationship and loyalty and provide joys of giving and sharing.

It allows you to do the following things
1. Keep in touch with only really close friends, and family.
2. Combine the various things we do to show our appreciation to family and friends –
a. Birthday reminders, leading to
b. finding out what to buy for that someone special through his/her wishlist,
c. Solving gift ideas headache,
d. Getting the best deal for the ideal gift from Amazon, Walmart.com,
e. then simplifying the whole gift-buying process.
3. Having online information (sadly, we do this too), so that you can share latest change in address, use this information to do buying by filling order form automatically, etc.

In future, we hope to add in money-pooling to buy a gift, organize events together, partner with e-greeting card companies, partner with online photoalbum, etc. We are trying to make it simple and convenient from send e-greeting to buy gifts to share photo album through the browsers without the hassle of too many steps.

We are planning to release the full version in US first within this half of the year 2005.

It is still in its’ infancy, we have not really tried to market it strongly yet. We still in the midst of experimenting our beta version within a small sample group what features will be useful for the users and also it is still not perfect yet in term of user friendliness.

Seeing from your blog comments, I can foresee some challenges that we will face when we proceed further to market it.

The questions I am trying to answer here are
1. How to balance benefits from the values by having such tools as ours, as compared to fear in loss of privacy?
2. How to market with being intrusive and creating a spamming scenario, as we also have a viral effect in the tool?
3. Are there any benefits at all in these types of concepts?

I am trying to get answers for these questions to further improve the tool itself and ways to market it later.

I guess I am trying to solicitate some feedback in an unconventional way, through your blog, rightly or wrongly. Anyway, hope my information prove to be useful even if I didn’t get the feedback.

Thanks.

cheers,
Kwong Yew Cheng,
y@oheyo.com
http://www.oheyo.com
oheyo.blogspot.com (not updated frequently yet)

In addition using OSS has the added advantage of empowering the user as OSS tends to be user/community-centric in its development and usage as opposed to mainly vendor-centric for proprietary close-source software.

—
Soo Hoe

While I can not speak for the other services that you mentioned, I can speak for Plaxo. I hope you find my comments sincere when I say that Plaxo does NOT “share”, “sell”, or exchange any information members manage within our service. We absolutely do not work with or support the activities of spammers. If you have heard or read otherwise, you have been misinformed.

True – the basic Plaxo service is free, and it is also true that Plaxo generates revenue through the upsell of Premium services build on top of the free basic service. These premium services include services such as our VIP Support, Holiday Card Service, Birthday Reminder Service, Wireless solutions, and Address book optimizer for cleaning out duplicates, with more services to come.

We currently have nearly 5M users within the Plaxo service. People use our service to help manage their contact list information better and easier. In addition to helping to update out of date contact information and automatically keep it updated, Plaxo also provides of benefits such as anywhere, anytime web access to the member’s information, and automated quick backup and recovery capabilities for this critical information. Many a member has lost all of their data due to a system crash or lost laptop, only to be able to quickly restore their important address book data through Plaxo.

I should also note that managing your address book within Plaxo is really no different that managing the same type of information within a service such as Yahoo! or MSN Hotmail. You, yourself may have an address book online with a web mail service provider. The information members chose to manage with Plaxo and stored within our service is kept secure and is only accessible by the Plaxo member. The information is only used as instructed by the Plaxo member, and as I previously mentioned, Plaxo does NOT “share”, “sell”, or exchange any information with any 3rd parties.

But I would also like to commend you on the sound and useful advice you have provided regarding how to avoid and remove Spyware or Adware. Readers would be well served to follow your advice as I often recommend the usage of Spybot S&D and Adaware myself. I’m sure people will also find that these programs confirm that Plaxo is not spyware nor adware.

And if I may, I would also like to recommend for people who do not have an updated virus checking program, they can use a free online version such as TrendMicro’s HouseCall: http://housecall.trendmicro.com. They can use this service from a well-known anti-virus vendor to perform a free virus scan and clean up.

I apologize for my lengthy comment, but I hope this helps. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me.

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer
privacy @t plaxo.com