It’s really a small price to pay, but Tagged.com has agreed to settle—to the tune of $750k—with both New York state and Texas after both states charged the social networking site with using less than scrupulous tactics to try and build their user base.
If you recall—and we covered the drama on LawyersAndSettlements.com—Tagged.com was basically snagging users’ email lists and sending out “invitations” to those email addresses. The catch was that the invitations asked recipients to view private photos that the Tagged.com member wanted to share. Unfortunately, the Tagged.com member didn’t want to share any photos, and they had no clue that Tagged.com was going out and sending these emails to their entire personal email contact list.
For those who clicked through the invitation in hopes of finding those private photos, the only thing they really found was a ploy to get them to become Tagged.com members as well. Not cool.
So New York (specifically state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo) and Texas went after Tagged.com and now there’s an agreement to settle.
Of course, Tagged.com admits no wrongdoing. But they are going to pay $500,000 to New York and $250,000 to Texas. Along with paying these penalties, the Associated Press reports that Tagged.com will “not access contacts or send messages without the member’s informed permission” and it will “also provide clear and conspicuous disclosures”.
Tagged should be pulled off the internet, they claim they don't allow nudity and all this garbage but have gone into accounts marked private deleting photos they consider porn. Where others have remained on tagged with more filth that ever. Tagged's TOS rules are a joke, they don't work with enforcement. Last incident took place last week where the company with a P.O BOX name decided to work on the site improving it, this effected the privacy settings. Tagged failed to warn its members these changes were coming into effect and it ended up opening up profiles once marked PRIVATE into PUBLIC view without the users awareness. Tagged thinks its has rights to discriminate against users with Private profiles and remove what they consider porn! That is not the case people say, if ur marked private its considered your business and who u wish to share it with – tagged is not a parent of america but for some reason the crew thinks its GOD!