Is Flixster a Big Fat Spammer?

Found on The Internet Patrol on Sunday, 25 March 2007
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Once you join Flixster, Flixster commandeers your address book - your list of all of your personal contacts in your AOL (or Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail) address book - and sends out an invitation to join Flixster "from" you. Oh sure, you enable them to do it - but clearly enough people are unaware of what they are doing that it's causing a problem.

Using AOL as an example, when you first sign up for Flixster using an AOL email address, after you select a username and password, the very next screen prompts you for your AOL password!

If you use a Gmail address, you can get the same screen, only with the Gmail logo. Same for Hotmail and Yahoo.

Once you give them your password, they grab everyone's email addresses from your AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail address book, and spam them with the invitation. In your name using your email address.

Flixster's Terms of Service start out by saying: "I can’t believe you really clicked on this. What are you trying to find out? Here is our privacy policy (link to privacy policy)."

I don't know what's worse: Flixster scamming users, or users giving out the information so quickly. If scams really work that well, I should launch a site too and ask users for bank accounts. I really hope they end up on every blocklist out there.