Steve Rosenbaum is founder and CEO of, and the Author of the recently released McGrawHill Business book "Curation Nation" (March / 2011). Social networks are meant to be social - so let's work together to keep them that way. And secondly - don't let spammy practices creep into your daily life. What can we do? Well, to begin with - we need to recognize that the open web isn't something that is safe unless we protect it. Tumblr spam? FourSquare Spam? LinkedIn Spam? They're all places where people hang out - so the bad guys are their too. But the bad news is - the number of places where spam can raise its ugly head is on the rise. So, the good news is that there are smart folks looking to fight back against spam. They call it 'anti-virus' for your credit card. Yaron Samid has a cool startup called Bill Guard that reviews credit card transactions looking for minor charges from known rip-offs and cons, and allows users to report potential scams. And the idea of crowd-sourcing anti-spam is taking hold. The idea that we can - together - report Spam and use services like to stop malicious software as a group rather than one inbox at a time is the light at the end of the tunnel. They track developer reputations, and provide recommendations as to what apps are a potential threat. By monitoring social networks, they're able to see when an app is trying to connect to your profile, altering your information they may want to gather. UnSubscribe has a team that monitors social networks -analyzing apps and provides reporting on threats that varies subscriptions might pose. Our tools provide you access to simply remove unwanted or malicious applications and connections from social networks, allowing you to also notify your friends and family of potential threats to their information as well." With our software we give you the ability to control who and what information companies can access from your online identity and what email can make it into your inbox. is a tiny piece of free software that centralizes and automates the unsubscribe function - and crowd-sources information about where spam is coming from and how to stop it. It's digital pollution and its impact can't be overstated.īut, happily help is on the way. ![]() The result, I tense up as walk down the digital street - on alert rather than open to engagement and new ideas. I click 'spam' and work to train my spam filter, but again, it's little bursts that make the web less safe, less like a neighborhood, and more like a dangerous alley late at night. Again, the crooks and con artists make the digital world a bit more distrustful.Īnd then in email there's the growing number of spammers who send endless requests to 'print your companies business cards' or other come-ons that don't offer any unsubscribe or response email. But Craigslist scammers tear at the fabric of trust that makes Craigslist work - with folks asking for phone numbers, and I being resistant to share my number with folks I don't know. I want to respond: "You are a Spammer and you suck", but that would reveal my email address, and therefore make me vulnerable. Yet, every time I post on Craigslist, I get a few of these. When you're looking to sell a piece of electronics in your neighborhood, the inevitable request to pay your asking price plus 'a bit extra' so you can ship the item to a son who's in the army overseas is so clearly crap. This fast growing network of tweets and DM's is rapidly full of danger and spam - and that really sucks.Ĭraigslist spam is both personal - and destructive. Again, I need to report them as a spammer, block them, and sadly miss the 'funny picture' that never existed. Someone who's "just found a really funny picture of me" and sent me a link. ![]() What if this friend request is from someone from a long time ago, or a person you met at a conference or someone you're mildly acquainted with? Because responding to Facebook spam requires brainpower, it is truly disruptive. Of course, your first reaction is almost always right - but unlike the Nigerian prince who wants to send you his fortune after you wires him a hundred dollars, Facebook spam makes you have to think. But as the web has gone from the edge of our world to the electronic center of how we live, spammers have taken up new evil ways clog not just our inboxes, but our lives.įacebook spam is the most uncomfortable, because it forces you to rack your brain to make sure you don't know anyone named Burt Smith. And email was just part of how we lived our lives. It used to be that spam was something that clogged our inboxes.
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