New York Attorney General Sues Tagged.com
Turns out our recent story on the spammy social network Tagged.com had a fan — Andrew Cuomo, New York's attorney general. — Mr. Cuomo has announced he intends to sue the company “for deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy …
Context & Ripple Effects
Andrew Cuomo's office has spent two years building an enforcement playbook for social networks: the 2007 investigation of Facebook ended in a child-safety model agreement with the company that October, and in 2008 his office pushed ISPs to curb access to spam-heavy Usenet newsgroups. Tagged.com is the next target, and the suit lands days after a widely read Bits post flagged the network's spammy invitation emails — the same deceptive-marketing territory Cuomo hit earlier with Dell in 2007.
First-order effects
- Tagged.com now faces litigation over its viral contact-importing emails, which allegedly used members' address books to send invitations framed as personal messages — a growth tactic the lawsuit makes legally costly overnight.
- Every social network relying on aggressive 'invite your friends' loops must re-examine whether its own emails would survive the same scrutiny from New York's attorney general.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks gain a compliance wedge: tighter opt-in controls on contact importers become a competitive selling point against smaller sites that grew on unsolicited invitations, pressuring the whole mid-tier social space to self-regulate before regulators do it for them.
- Email providers and anti-spam vendors see leverage rise — if state AGs treat social-network invitations as deceptive marketing rather than mere nuisance mail, filtering and blocking decisions acquire legal backing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, New York's attorney general functions as a de facto national regulator for consumer-facing web services — settling standards through enforcement where federal law lags, as the Facebook agreement and this suit both demonstrate.
- Viral growth mechanics built on scraped address books head toward obsolescence as a business model, forcing social platforms toward explicit user consent as the default for any automated outreach.
The trend: State attorneys general are filling the vacuum left by absent federal online-privacy rules, using high-profile suits to set de facto conduct standards for social networks.