NakedSecurity's Graham Cluley published an interesting writeup on a mysterious social media management service's campaign to enlist networkers.
The service is called "Connect.me" and the proprietors have been trolling Facebook and Twitter with hot-linked invitations to "reserve your connect.me username".
When users follow the link, they are asked to allow the service's application to interface with their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.
According to Cluley's research, potentially thousands of people have already done so. The problem is, no one is entirely sure what Connect.me is or what the consequences of allowing the third-party application to access their social networking sites might be.
"...oddly, no-one seems to know what connect.me is. Not that that stopped some of them from signing up anyway. Even connect.me is declining to give away much information, describing itself as a 'better way to manage your social connections' but admitting that it's unable to share any more information as it's currently in 'ninja stealth mode'," Cluley writes.
What information the service does provide is juvenile in its presentation, and cryptic at best:
The point of Cluley's article is that in the age of social media scams, why would anyone blindly allow third-party access to their social media accounts?
"...facial hair and a friendly smile is not enough to convince me that I should hand over the keys to my Twitter and Facebook account. Chances are that Connect.me may have no bad intentions, and that Joe is a nice chap, but I am extremely uncomfortable with the willingness of people to join a service which potentially exposes their social networking accounts when they have no idea what it is they're signing up for," Cluley writes.
Cluley's article provides more details on the phenomena, as well as a nice assemblage of screenshots. For more details on the curious service, see Cluley's full article:
Source: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/09/connect-me-rush-risky-behaviour-social-networkers/