Quechup (kway-chup) was a social networking website that came to prominence in 2007 when it used automatic email invitations for viral marketing to all the e-mail addresses in its members' address books.[1] This was described as a "spam campaign" and raised a great deal of criticism.
The automatic invitation of all the contacts in the e-mail address books of people who signed up to their service was controversial for two reasons:
This attracted a great deal of criticism[3] in September 2007.
Reacting to the criticism, Quechup's parent company iDate Corporation made a public statement on 17 September 2007,[4] stating that:
Much of the criticism focused on misleading users by hiding the nature of the feature in the 'small print' of the site terms[5] and not specifying it in the Quechup privacy policy, which stated only, "You agree that we may use personally identifiable information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyse site usage, improve our content and product offerings, and customize our Site's content, layout, and services.".[6]
While admitting the campaign was misleading, technology blogger Chris Hambly pointed out that text explaining how the feature worked was placed in normal print directly above the feature, raising the question of a user's responsibility to read what they agree to, although he noted that this explanatory text failed to clearly state what would happen.[7]
In their 17 September statement, Glen Finch, Chief Technology Officer stated
This has raised the issue of users automatically 'opting in' without first understanding what they are accepting, rather than automatically 'opting out' of questionable features.
Quechup responded by changing how it operated its service and belatedly reassuring customers it was not acting maliciously, even if irresponsibly.
The Quechup affair encouraged calls for open authentication through an OpenID system such as Yahoo's BBauth, which would allow a user to grant limited access to their data, without providing passwords directly to a website.[12] Indeed, Quechup adopted Windows Live ID Delegated Authentication, an OpenID system for Windows Live and Hotmail users.
In a more recent development, technology journalist Robert X. Cringely raised the possibility that Quechup may be sending fake dating invitations to subscribers that attempts to get them to sign up to a premium service. In his article, Cringely stated that it was not certain if these fake e-mails were the work of what he called a "rogue Quechup affiliate who gets a commission for sign ups" or a more sophisticated automatic spam operation.[13]