Exactly. The particularly worrying thing is that RapLeaf changed their privacy policy and made the change retroactive. Where early users of UpScoop were assured that the company would not “email, contact, or spam any friends from an email address book” nor would it “sell, rent, or lease email addresses to partners”, those promises were simply and cynically broken.

It’s interesting and, I think, significant that the published apology simply fails to mention that Upscoop addresses are handed over to rapleaf. The new privacy policy hints obliquely that it just might happen – “Information captured via Upscoop may be used to assist Rapleaf’s services” – it would be much more accurate to say “Once you have given us all your friends’ contact details, we will create Rapleaf pages for all of them whether they like it or not”, and their dissimulation on this point is hardly ethical.