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Comment on Typing In an E-Mail Address, and Giving Up Your Friends’ as Well

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Similar article from Time: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1903810,00....

On the one hand, I'm not happy that Tagged and co are getting all this publicity, but on the other I'm hoping that it helps to stem the tide a bit. It's shocking how many people have not learned the importance of keeping passwords secret.

I work for a web dev firm, and one of the features a client wants is a facebook-style "invite your friends by giving us your e-mail and password" feature. I'm trying to think of a nice way of convincing the client that the feature they want is really a psychological bug that's going to cause long-term problems for, well, everyone on the internet.

Why not use bbauth? I know Yahoo and Google support it. That way you can grab their email contacts without requiring them to give you their email/password. It just sends them to the email provider to login, then back to your site with the api token to access their address book.

Still spams a buncha folks tho'.

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