You refer to Spock as being “promiscuous” about using other people’s address books. I can tell you for a fact that we do not send ANY emails to people unless they are user generated, and the user approves them. Furthermore, when someone does request trust, we clearly state that the other person will get an email to the user.

I also read your comment about Spock tricking them into sending invites. I do not believe the facts support your case.

For example, take today’s data:

Over 1.5 million email address book lookups were conducted by users to see where their friends are on the web. If we were doing what you say, we would be sending out over 1.5 million emails / trust requests per day.

Instead, only 80,000 trust requests have been sent though those lookups. This means that 95% of the time, users only want to look-up where their friends are on the web, and not invite them to Spock. Which is great, and they have no issue with telling Spock not to send them a trust request. The other 5% of the time, it appears that users want to invite friends to their trust network. We get about 1,500 confirmed trust connections per hour. Which means that of the 80,000 trust request emails, about 36,000 are being confirmed daily by both sides.

I agree that there are some cases that a user may invite people without wanting to and maybe not reading the instructions carefully. We constantly update the process to make sure it is as clear as possible, and take user feedback very seriously. Most of the changes we made in messaging has been a result of feedback from users.

If there are other things you believe we can do, please feel free to email me at jay@spock.com.