Social networking movie review site Flixster wants your Gmail and AOL passwords

[mandy]

Recently I started getting invitations to join Flixster from both friends and complete strangers. Obviously, this was spam, but why were these complete strangers sending it to me?...

We decided to investigate, and here is what we found:

Once you join Flixster, Flixster commandeers your address book - your list of all of your personal contacts in your AOL (or Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail) address book - and sends out an invitation to join Flixster “from” you. Oh sure, you enable them to do it - but clearly enough people are unaware of what they are doing that it’s causing a problem.

How?

Flixster is getting their AOL (and Hotmail, and Yahoo, and Gmail) passwords!...

full article: http://www.theinternetpatrol.com.nyud.ne...dress-book

[regic]

unbelievable.

[BellisimaJ.]

Talk about privacy violations..........

[jezebel]

What kind of an idiot would give out their email password? :asshat2:

[accentnepal]

I have my home page set to my email account.
Every time I open my computer, there is that open form sitting there asking me for my password. I often start typing it in just from habit, not really wanting to check mail. That is of course OK, I know where I am.

But give people a form to fill and there is a certain compulsion to fill it. We are taught that in school - if we do not fill in all the blanks we get a bad grade on the test. That's why phishing works, if you send forms to enough people some will fill them out.

Even tax forms.