Social-networking site Tagged.com has become a target of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and the bane of a multitude of customers.
社交网站Tagged.com已经成为纽约州总检察长安德鲁库莫（Andrew Cuomo）的目标和大批用户的痛苦之源。
“There’s a thin line between clever and stupid,” went the faux maxim from Spinal Tap, yet it seems to apply pretty well to Web startups. One of the most notoriously over-the-line is the social-networking site Tagged.com, which New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo says he plans to sue for false advertising, deceptive business, and identity theft.
出自电影《巡回演出》（Spinal Tap）的一句仿名言就是：“聪明糊涂一线间”，这句话似乎对网络新创公司非常适用，最臭名远扬的越线者之一便是社交网站Tagged.com了。纽约州总检察长安德鲁库莫说他计划对这家网站涉嫌发布虚假广告、进行商业诈骗、盗取身份信息等提起诉讼。
What makes the case timely is that many of Tagged.com’s practices, like mass emails and data mining, have become commonplace among social media sites. But Tagged’s aggressive combination of these digital promotions set it apart from its competitors, Cuomo charges. According to the attorney general’s press release, “Consumers who visited Tagged were tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts, which the company then used to send millions of promotional emails.” He added: “This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts.”
Tagged.com的行径，比如群发邮件、挖掘数据，在社交媒体网站中已属正常，不过它极具侵略性地把这些数字宣传方式结合在一起，使自己从其他竞争者中“脱颖而出”，因此库莫适时对其进行了指控。这位总检察长在新闻发布会上说：“访问Tagged的消费者被骗取了个人邮箱地址，然后邮箱中会收到成千上万的广告邮件。”他补充道：“这种恶性的垃圾邮件就如同有人闯进你家里，盗取了地址簿并向所有联系人发送虚假邮件一样。”
In a blog post, Tagged co-founder Greg Tseng stated, “We are dismayed that Cuomo’s office, which has shown itself to be fairly well-versed in the Internet, would issue an inaccurate and inflammatory accusation.” Tseng denied that Tagged was trying to trick anyone and attributed the email outbreak to a faulty registration process.
Tagged创始人之一格雷格唐森（Greg Tseng）在一篇博客中这样写道：“库莫的办公室团队显示自己对网络的‘精通’，对他们要发起的这一次错误而又具煽动性的指控，我们感到很失望。”唐森否认了Tagged试图欺骗顾客，并解释垃圾邮件的爆发是因为注册程序出现错误。