Social Networking Site 'Annoying' or Illegal?

July 9, 2009— -- When Time magazine reporter Sean Gregory got an e-mail from a friend saying she'd posted photos on the social networking Web site Tagged.com, he logged on to see them.

But there were no pictures, and his friend did not send him the e-mail. Instead, Gregory says, it was a ruse designed to steal his online address book.

"As soon as I clicked it, I got these e-mails from my wife and best friends saying, 'What the heck is this? Should I touch this?'" Gregory recalls. "It made me so angry that I wrote about it for Time.com."

The headline on his article, "Tagged: The World's Most Annoying Web site," expresses his frustration.

But the New York attorney general's office says the site did more than just annoy the e-mail recipients: The office is investigating claims the company stole personal contact information from millions of unsuspecting people.

Gregory, investigators say, was one of 60 million people -- and 5 million in New York alone -- allegedly duped by Tagged.

The allegations involve a practice called "contact scraping," which security experts say is a growing, invasive form of identity theft.

Investigators say the site uses a person's e-mail address to lure his or her friends and associates into giving up their personal contacts.

Here is how investigators say the process works: After a user logs in to a social networking Web site, the site captures the user's contact list, which is often stored in an e-mail account. The site then uses the contacts it takes to send e-mail "invitations" or updates to everyone in the contact list on behalf of a user.