Is skillpages.com Safe?

Someone I do not know had my personal email address in his contacts and I, too, was "Invited" to join Skillpages. I clicked the link in the email to unsubscribe my email address from any further "Invitations" - and Rated these email address thieves as Do Not Trust Right away on WOT. Do not fall for this scam masquerading as a "Social Network" or "Employment Site"!

New users signing up are invited to 'activate your network', which means giving Skillpages access to their contacts list on GMail, Facebook, Hotmail or other services. It appears that Skillpages uses the imported contacts to generate automated messages to the user's contacts, informing them that such-and-such a person has just added them to their network or rated them for a skill. It's unclear (without going through the whole signup process and potentially spamming all your friends) exactly how much control new users have over these messages, or whether Skillpages makes it clear that they will be sending messages in the user's name. What is certain is that Skillpages is a source of large amounts of unsolicited email whose main purpose is to promote the Skillpages site. This has led to Skillpages being blocked by some institutions. See: *****

Upon sign-up, they asked if user wants to send invites. That did not happen, they sent invitation anyway whether I agree or disagree, to all my email address contacts, including those whom I wouldn't even dare send any invitation to anything. That's embarrassing to my part. I sent them a message complaint, I did not receive any response.

Despite how good or not the service is, there is a highly unethical use of contact import functionality to spam invites with, it is presumed, the intention of trying to grow their user base as quickly as possible. Deliberately vague terms of use and privacy policies with regards to the use of contact import functionality and what is done with the contact data that is obtained. As a systems administrator with several thousand users in our organization, we are extremely displeased with this blatant abuse of privacy. We have blocked web access from our network, and blacklisted all known email domains where email from them, or on behalf of them, originates from. I've contacted numerous other systems administrators within like organizations and advised they do the same.

Java applet grabs user's contact lists and spams the contacts. Block ***** to stop the SPAM. To stop SkillPages from grabbing contacts from users' contact lists, block Java applet by blocking this on your firewall or proxy: “http://dyjab6i3qfxan.cloudfront.net/20121210.6/Resources/Internal/ContactsFinder/ContactsFinder.jar”.