Out of all the social networks that exist, I think that I hate Tagged the most.  Yup, I hate it more than Yaari.  The way that Tagged grew was by sending unsolicited e-mail invitations after taking over the contact list of user e-mail accounts.

It was inevitable that Tagged would be attacked legally by someone, but I seriously did not expect a whole state to sue them.  The attorney general of New York announced earlier that they plan to sue Tagged for deceptive email practices and privacy invasion.

“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” stated New York Attorney General Cuomo in a press release.  “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical – and illegal – behavior.  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.  We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”

Tagged started in San Francisco about 5 years ago and claims to have 70 million registered users with 4 billion pageviews per month.  The company was founded by Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith.

“Today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Cuomo is disheartening,” stated Tagged founder Greg Tseng in a blog post.  ”Identify theft and invasion of privacy are very serious allegations and it is not accurate to portray Tagged, or any other social network, in this regard.