Giving Away Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail Password

Yes, I agree the scripts that allow you to access your email address books provide convenience and eliminates typo errors when entering email addresses. But, giving away your email username and password is a major, and I mean MAJOR security issue. Don’t you think?

You never know, if the particular website that runs the script is actually storing your username and password in their database. With just these two elements, the website can then start sending emails to your contacts, without your permission and your contact will think you are spamming them.

That’s not very cool, eh? Surely, having known that this might happen, you can probably give away your username and password and after that change your password again. Now, that’s no longer convenient, eh? In fact, that would really suck!

Now, let’s think of another scenario. Let’s say, the website that is asking you to do such things is a credible one. What sort of websites would qualify as credible. Keeping a low criteria, let’s say it’s Facebook. We all know how Facebook applications have this particular step where they asks you to inform your friends about the things you are about to do on Facebook. Now, there is an option for you to not only inform those friends who are in your Facebook network. You can now also inform friend in your Hotmail address book.

So, the same steps would follow: you choose to inform your Hotmail contacts. Facebook however does it a little differently, which I think gives me more confidence and assurance that my Hotmail password will not be taken by Facebook. As usual, in order to access my Hotmail address book, I must first login to the account. This is done at the Hotmail website (or now known as Windows Live). I can verify this from the message that says I am on Hotmail website and the URL is also that of Hotmail. Once I have logged in successfully, I can then carry on and choose the contacts I wish to share the information with.

Now, maybe, just maybe, after Facebook sends out the email to my Hotmail contacts, it keeps a copy of the email addresses. I don’t know for sure, but I "trust" Facebook enough to actually do it. So far, so good. None of my friends have started calling me and telling me to fuck off for spamming.

There is a particular website though, that has been misusing the access to my friends’ address books. I’m not sure if they are aware of it, but I sure hope they read this post. The website is tagged.com. I get emails every now and then from tagged.com asking me to join the site. Unfortunately, I have little time for social networking, so somehow, I feel I have enough networking to do on Facebook, Friendster, Multiply, MySpace and LinkedIn.

Warm Regards,

 

PS: I think the email service providers should protect our address books. Continue the discussion at http://edborhan.blogspot.com/2008/07/hotmailgmailyahoo-address-book-security.html.