This morning, I saw a message in my inbox that said John Smith, a pseudonym for an old friend, which said (and I quote verbatim):
"[John] asked us to reach out and confirm they have your latest info"
John never asked Brewster to reach out. He simply clicked on a message in his inbox that told him the same lie: "[some old friend] has asked us to reach out and confirm your latest info" and in turn it spammed all of his contacts with the same deceitful message.
It is embarrassing to have an app lie to my contacts, some of whom I don't wish to contact and certainly not have an app lie and suggest that I have interest in reconnecting with them. There are people in my inbox, including a whole bunch of the truly forgotten kind (ex girlfriend's, slimy ex business contacts, etc) whom I'd never want to open any sort of contact with, never mind asking them to confirm their latest info.
Clearly, Brewster is a scam spread by outright deception.
Google is to blame, too. They only state "Manage Your Contacts" not "Send messages to your contacts" in the app permissions.
What are my legal options here? I deleted the app from my Google account but they already have my data and they already contacted a ton of people.
Is this something to report to Google or my state's attorney general? or whom should I contact to try and bring justice here to the tens or hundreds of thousands of users who like me simply clicked to verify their contact info not knowing that this terrible lying app would go and "reach out" to old contacts and tell them that they were asked by the person whom they lied to to confirm their latest info, which is itself a lie. In other words, acquiring users through outright deception.
Find out the emails of the founders/engineers of the app, then sign up with their email address to every newsletter and spam list you could think of. Use crunchbase to find the info.
Maybe a taste of their own medicine could slap some reality into them.
I never signed up with them, but I just got a similar piece of spam, but supposedly originating from someone I don't know, and not referring to me by my actual name.
"[John] asked us to reach out and confirm they have your latest info"
John never asked Brewster to reach out. He simply clicked on a message in his inbox that told him the same lie: "[some old friend] has asked us to reach out and confirm your latest info" and in turn it spammed all of his contacts with the same deceitful message.
It is embarrassing to have an app lie to my contacts, some of whom I don't wish to contact and certainly not have an app lie and suggest that I have interest in reconnecting with them. There are people in my inbox, including a whole bunch of the truly forgotten kind (ex girlfriend's, slimy ex business contacts, etc) whom I'd never want to open any sort of contact with, never mind asking them to confirm their latest info.
Clearly, Brewster is a scam spread by outright deception.
Google is to blame, too. They only state "Manage Your Contacts" not "Send messages to your contacts" in the app permissions.
What are my legal options here? I deleted the app from my Google account but they already have my data and they already contacted a ton of people.
Is this something to report to Google or my state's attorney general? or whom should I contact to try and bring justice here to the tens or hundreds of thousands of users who like me simply clicked to verify their contact info not knowing that this terrible lying app would go and "reach out" to old contacts and tell them that they were asked by the person whom they lied to to confirm their latest info, which is itself a lie. In other words, acquiring users through outright deception.
Thanks for any tips about dealing with this