Beware of Grouply

Especially those with a Yahoo account. I received the following information from a Yahoo group I belong to (from a reliable source):

“This so-called “service” (Grouply) accesses your private data and can change
your account.

There are a few new services coming online which are social “networking”
sites similar to My Space and Facebook. One of these new services is
called “Grouply”. Grouply is tapping Yahoo lists and reposting the
messages to Grouply members. As soon as ONE list member joins this
service, all of our messages will then be archived by Grouply. Grouply
changes your email address to (yourname)@grouply. com. for the purpose
of your Yahoo list mail only. They will also go into your Yahoo account
and change all of your preferences regarding how you view your mail,
whether you get individual posts or digests, and whether you can be
directly added to any of a million other Yahoo groups.

In order to do this, Grouply requires that you give them your Yahoo ID
and password. I am truly hoping that most of our members are smart
enough not to hand over that information to ANYONE–especially to
another web service! There is no guarantee that this information that
Grouply is aggregating is secure, thus leaving your sign-in info
available to spammers and hackers–including all of our list files and
photos.

Important information on Grouply: The archives of Yahoo groups can be
made available to the public through the individuals members sharing
them within Grouply. It does not matter at all if a group is set so that
only members can access archives, if a group member makes it available
on Grouply, it’s available to anyone and everyone through that website.

The other problem is the obvious concerns about having to give up Yahoo
IDs and passwords in order to participate in Grouply. Even worse is that
since having so many Yahoo group owners find that their groups can be
copied to anyone with a Grouply membership without the permission of the
group or its owner, Grouply decided to do an “opt-out” option. Group
owners never “opted in”, and in order to opt out a group the owners of
the Yahoo group have to join Grouply.

Even Worse, viruses are being passed through Grouply with out the users
knowledge and are being spread through Yahoo and Google groups around
the world. Yahoo and Google may not catching all the viruses. Many
list owners are banning/removing people who access their lists through
Grouply, and are working with the Grouply founders to fix the serious
security problems that were discovered by list owners testing the system
out of necessity because their lists’ integrity was being compromised.
Many people got an invite from a friend of their’s and found out their
friend didn’t send it to them and many times it contained a virus (a
TROJAN virus used to obtain personal information logged on your
computer. It then e-mails itself to your entire address book or contact
directory and now groups to infect more users).

Here is a link to Yahoo Security: http://security. yahoo.com/ to find
more information.”

And, although it should be obvious, don’t give out your passwords to ANYONE.