Youtube providing email to spammers ?

Filed in archive Newsdesk 2.0 on August 16, 2006

BoingBoing reports on hidden functionality in the sharing capabilities of Youtube that will send your email adress to a company that possibly makes it available to spammers.

Clicking on the button to enable the code revealed that the JavaScript was hosted at -- gasp -- Plaxo (no linkee for them), the company that enlists its users to send spamalicious address book related emails.

When asked, Plaxo says it is not the case :

"no e-mails are being "unwittingly added to our databases, YouTube is using our Address Book Access Widget so their users can easily pick people from their Hotmail/gmail/outlook/etc address books to send video links to."

techcrunch's Michael Arrington reported about Plaxo's apologies in March this year for their actions resulting in big piles of email to subscribers. I wonder where this is going....Remarkable enough Youtube is down at the moment : We're currently putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins. Yeah, removing some scripts ??