Yaari, Social Network or International Scam?
by
on October 31, 2007,
Yaari is Hindi for friendship and Prerna Gupta, founder and CEO of Yaari.com and co-founder Parag Chordia, are playing heavily on that key word to create a social network for the Indian youth. Their goal is to go head-to-head with Google?s Orkut for the Indian market.
In an interview with Kiruba Shankar at PodTech India, Ms. Gupta born, raised and still living in the USA had this to say, ?Well, I first came up with the idea in June of 2005. So, I was about a little under a year and a half ago. And that time I was looking at a venture capital firm so,” Ms. Gupta goes on to say, ?…at the same time, Facebook (at that time was really becoming very big in the US. So, I was, one of my friends actually was an executive at the Facebook… I wanted to do something in India, with all these things kind of came together and I started wondering what's going on with social networking in India?.
According to Ms. Gupta part of her reason to create Yaari was, ?…I was in a very short time convinced that there was a big opportunity in India for social networking site that was specifically targeting Indian youths.?
Registering for Yaari
When accessing the registration page of Yaari I was stunned to discover the following notice:
?By registering for Yaari and agreeing to the Terms of Use, you authorize Yaari to send an e-mail notification to all the contacts listed in the address book of the e-mail address you provide during registration.?
Immediately as a potential registrant by seeking and accepting membership, Yaari tells you, you have to grant them unrestricted access to your personal contact list. Something it seems many registrants failed to read in the beginning as they now complain and cancel their accounts after the fact. The contradiction is that when you join or create an e-mail account on other sites they warn you NOT to give out your password. With Yaari it is a matter of how badly do you want to join? Potential Yaari members really need to ask this question before proceeding, Is it worth compromising my privacy to the extent of allowing Yaari uncontrolled access to my personal e-mail account(s)?
It goes on to state that THEY (Yaari), NOT YOU, will, ?…notify your friends that you have registered for Yaari and will encourage them to register for the site?.
Then Yaari smoothly turns the tables as they put the onus back on you to decide if membership is worth giving up the privacy of your e-mail contacts. ?Yaari will never store your e-mail password or login to your e-mail account without your consent. If you do not want Yaari to send an e-mail notification to your e-mail contacts, do not register for Yaari.? That then raises a question of just how many individuals even took the time to read the latter before joining Yaari.
To ensure they (Yaari) gain the sought after access to your contacts list when you try to enter an e-mail address for registration a bubble pops up with the following details, ?You must use a Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail address. No-worries, we use this e-mail to confirm your registration, and will not spam you or sell your contact information?. Once you have decided which email address you will use based on your three choices another screen pops up asking for your email account password before you can continue.
Inside Yaari
On entering Yaari, I found nothing out of the ordinary as I noted the normal multiple advertisements and the headers directing you to the normal choices of service provided as on any social networking site.
Yaari design is simple yet effective as I navigated the site with ease.
Except for the heavily ad driven pages; it seems Yaari has done its homework for making the site profitable, based on the fact it, like other social networking sites, does not charge a fee for membership. I did note a small twist when I opened my Friend?s page as here Yaari has opted to solicit advertising from you the member by offering you your own advertising space.
Reflecting about how Ms. Gupta had expressed that Yaari had been created with Indian Youth in mind, I questioned the value of offering them ad space, for a fee of course.
Yaari, overall, has taken advertising solicitation to new lows as nearly every link has a pop-up advertisement attached, which personally I found to be annoying.
I could not help but chuckle as I then went to the Mobile link page. You have the choice to use Yaari on your cell phone and Ms. Gupta has taken it on herself to provide you the opportunity to view HER most popular friends, HER profile, and the opportunity to pinch HER, as well as your contact friends.
My immediate thoughts are of a vain woman who feels that everyone is joining Yaari solely because of her, yea right!
As for adding Yaari to your mobile, based on Yaari already spamming emails of member e-mail contact lists, my consensus would be to avoid using this option.
Yaari groups however, does offer interesting choices with something for everyone with such groups as Music, Journalism and Business to Leisure and Spiritual/Religious, to name a few, under which members have the choice to create and/or join a forum of their choice and allowing members to create and interact, free of marketing pop-ups.
Portions of Yaari Policy Questionable
D) Privacy
Yaari has established a Privacy Policy to explain to Members how their information is collected and used, which Member can read by clicking http://www.yaari.com/policy.php. Member's use of the Yaari website or the Services signifies acknowledgment of and agreement to Yaari?s Privacy Policy. … The email address(s) that you supply to use this service will only be used to send invitations to connect with you on Yaari. By registering for the Yaari website, and by giving Yaari member's email address and password, a member agrees to the Terms of Service and consents to allow Yaari to automatically send an email from the member to member's contacts,…Invitation emails will be sent on member's behalf, with the 'from' address set as member's email address. Yaari will never store member's email password.
If Yaari does not store members' e-mail passwords then how are they able to e-mail members contact lists to seek membership?
F) Member Account and Password
… Member is responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of Member's password and account. Furthermore, Member is entirely responsible for any and all activities that occur under Member's account…
No Spam Policy
We at Yaari.com are opposed to spam. Our No Spam Policy and Terms of Service prohibit all users from engaging in any activity involving spam on our service.
What Yaari Members are saying?
# 4 May 9th, 2007 at 7:22 am ?…Hi! I'm surfing yaari since february 2007. Since then I have made lots of friends through yaari. so I am a die hard fan of this site…?
# 5 May 9th, 2007 at 11:03 pm ?…Wishing PRERNA with all the 'prerna' for a joyous and colourful SUCCESS.?
#9 September 2nd, 2007 at 11:45 pm ?Yaari has spammed all the contacts in my address book. The spam invites all contacts in my address book to join yaari or else I will be sad.? ?Try Yaari at your own peril.?
# 11 September 4th, 2007 at 10:00 pm ?What is the meaning of “created by Indian youth, for Indian youth” by a person who never lived in India? It is just a marketing hype and one another spam.?
#16 October 18th, 2007 at 5:19 pm “…This site sent out over 600 emails to my entire contact list. I'm not even Indian! Prerna Gupta needs a quick 101 on business ethics before she tries to become an entrepreneur.”
Conclusion
I first became aware of Yaari when I received an invite from one of my LinkedIn connections. Because of the number of requests to join varied networking organizations I have now made it a policy to check out each invitation before I decide to reject or commit. Yaari, as I learned, was full of surprises as I began an adventure into a world reeking with all the makings of a mini Enron.
My first hint at the notoriety behind this social network was when I googled Yaari and immediately found controversial warnings of e-mail contact list invasion. After I examined a few of the expressed claims, I decided to reply to my business contact to substantiate he had indeed sent me the invite. You can imagine my dismay when I discovered the return address was to admin@yaari.com as opposed to the e-mail address of the Yaari member.
His reply was, considering the time zones, quick and to the point. ?…excellent Allan, thanks very much for your thoughtful actions I would never send out an email like the one you received I deleted my account as soon as I found out what they did so please consider the email as spam my email I always sign with “best regards, ****”
best regards, ****?. I have chosen not to reveal his name out of respect for his privacy.
Now I was extremely curious and needed to find out, for myself, what was happening. After all, I was writing a story on Yaari and I needed to have some concrete information of my own to ensure my facts were correct.
Remember Yaari has already stated they only use your e-mail to confirm your registration. They will NOT spam you or SELL your contact information. However, Yaari policy clearly states in section E) ?Notice Regarding Commercial Email?
Members consent to receive commercial e-mail messages from Yaari, and acknowledge and agree that their e-mail addresses and other personal information may be used by Yaari for the purpose of initiating commercial e-mail messages.
In non-technical language as a member, you have authorized them (Yaari Admin) the full rights to your e-mail contacts. In addition, you authorized Yaari to send out invitations and potential commercial e-mail messages for which you the member are responsible for the content. The fact you are unaware of any correspondence sent on your behalf from your e-mail account without your knowledge is in this case irrelevant.
A lesson it seems many of Yaari?s disgruntled members have learned the hard way as noted in, ?Comments to Prerna Gupta of Yaari.com?.
I did join Yaari to ensure I was able to give an honest review. In doing so, I found a flaw in the registration process that allowed me to bypass giving Yaari access to my e-mail contacts. I did take full advantage of the flaw and in my research, I found Ms. Gupta to be misleading and manipulative as she feeds, like a pariah on a people in a country for which she does not live, purely for profit at their expense. Yaari.com is in my eyes nothing more then an elaborate internet fraud bringing shame to honest social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Orkut as examples and needs to be investigated fully by the laws governing such internet sites.
All of this from two Stanford University Alumni that makes me ask the question, is this what Universities are teaching, ?How to Create International On-line Swindles 101??
Yaari.com gets two thumbs down and I mean down.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to profy RSS feed!
Svetlana Gladkova
doe
CopyrightLawSucks 
kwarren84 
Michael Fidler 
Jaime A. Restrepo 
Yolanda
Web businesses built with honest intent and quality content, rock. Those using hidden agendas and questionable tactics, deserve to be exposed.
Good on ya Allan
J.R.
I do not know to call Yaari a virus or spam.
They say that you need to be 18 or older to join the site. But, when they steal e-mail addresses from your address book and send out spam asking people to join yaari, they do not verify if an e-mail address is that of a minor or not.
I have rarely seen any legitimate businesses advertising on yaari. When ever I see one, I make it a point to let them know that yaari is a scam. I have also sent complaints to gmail, hotmail, yaaho and ftc.
After reading this whole post and examining the Yaari.com site, all I can say is that I’m shocked.
I am actually shocked and angry when yaari didnt allow me registering without giving my gmail id password. It is indeed very bad playing with the users. And i also have seen lot of spam invitations of yaari from my friends address books which i am sure they are helpless.
this is not the way B2C (community) business to be done.
Because there is no way to Skip or avoid sending invites to all the people in your friend list… i did not register for Yaari!!!
I had written about this scam back in July in an article titled “Say NO to Yaari.com” urging netizens to boycott the site: http://www.aalaap.com/2007/07/say-no-to-yaaricom.html
^ real shame…
Another site i don’t want to name, not only mailed me to become someone’s “blah” but even sent me an auto-generated userid, password ,and welcome note congratulating me on signing up. Now, i know where these “active users” numbers come from !
But, it’s still just a glimpse of things to come. Think of what all the mail youre going to get when a google or any one of its lovely 17-20 parners allows practically any web developer on the face of the earth, to play with your profile details, tap your personal info ,and make the world a better place with a more “openSocial” platform. But the difference is that popular opinion make it sound as if it’s cool to throw open your contacts and personal life to the world. Sure i can’t wait to see how many orkutters i-dont-want-to-know live around in one sq. mile, or how many people with my last name want to meet me or why 101 quantifiable reasons why i should export the contact details of my “top friends list ” as JSON rather than XML.
I just hope people understand both that sometimes opening up the social graph can be just as nasty as the fine-print exhibited ^ so well. Be it facebook’s profile pages going public OR google’s openSocial OR a yaari’s privacy policies.
Although there are lots of +ves out of the ^, at the end of the day i just hope that “users” have the choice as to whether we want our personal lives becoming just another RESTful API call out there.
Keep Clicking,
Bhasker V Kode
I can not believe that these guys are still contibuing to spam people. What is even more scary is that they are reaching your mobile too.
Say no to yaari, no to spam.
I received an invite to Yaari from my dad, so figured it was OK to open/register. Afterall, he must have. Well, he’s 65 and I’m sure did not read the “fine print”. I registered, being in the digital marketing space for over 10yrs thinking - there’s no way these guys are phishing for email addresses. I am embarrassed and outraged that that’s exactly what happened. An email was sent to everyone in my address book, including senior executives at a Fortune 100 company I am interviewing with. This is absolutely outrageous and Yaari.com must be boycotted and moreso, exposed. I am also horrified that my young son (7yrs old) received an email, as well as 2 of his young friends who have email addresses (checked by their parents). I’m sure the young CEO had good intentions (or perhaps there’s my naivety again), but her business model, quite frankly, sucks. This business will not sustain, because it’s a deceiving one.
LOL - how dumb do you have to be to give yaari - or any portal for that matter - the password to your PERSONAL email account?
Quit complaining like sooks and grow some brains!
This people (Yaari founders) should be in jail! Today I found out about Yaari when I opened my email inbox and I saw 10 invitations! I thought Wow, this must be some super stuff!!! But then I saw what it actually was! Of course I didn’t register!
I really, really hope this people will be put under lock… * sigh * but I doubt that will actually happen…
Yaari.Yuk!
hi im swadesh from mauritius,im seeking from friends via yaari.com
Typical scam network. Not first, not last. A few of my friends fell upon such scams and i received their automatic invitations. So i have to teach them, to always read “terms of service”! And if anyone anywhere anyhow asks your password - BE AWARE!
This web site is scam. This web site got into my email address book and is sending Friendship request to everyone on my email address book without my knowledge. I am terribly upset with this. It has sent Friendship request to even my business contact, not just indian friends.
Hope you fix this. They do not take care of privacy at all. I would not recommend anyone to register at this web site.
Rama
I really, really wish I’d read this article before signing up for Yaari. I too found the loophole that allows you to bypass emailing all your contacts - however, they clearly DID store my information, because a couple weeks later every single one of my contacts was spammed with a Yaari invite. So, they broke their own terms of use! It is a scam, big time.
I donno what is happing to people.
I have heard that people are giving up their souls and cigerates, but their passwords??? No waaaaay!!!
I hope that yaari will get a reversable results. Their website seems dirty from the first look. I was registering and I just closed the browser when they asked me for my e-mail password. Stubid freaking yaari.
A good site to visit to know about people and their comments. As I am an Indian I wish to share my knowledge and experience with my e-mail friends. I am an documentalist, artist and i can interpret dreams if the e-mail friend provide his/her date of birth. Good and sincere interpretation brings good fortune. if the dream not mentioned to any one it will be hang for ever. Please share this message to all your Yaari memebers.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you indeed for this article. I got an invitation from someone I don’t know to join yaari but after reading this, I will definitely pass.
Hi,
I also registered on yaari.com and several months later they SPAMMED my entire address book, which is really really bad.
the website owner has a profile, where you can leave a message so let her know what you think of her.
http://hi5.com/friend/97540091–Prerna–Profile-html
It is not taught by any university to do that. Come on, you have just added that line to spice up the story. It is what their weird crooked minds came up with. You have tons of politicians in India who have multiple education degrees, were they taught by those colleges to be bad?
absolutely outrageous, I was lucky enough to feel immediately something is wrong and used my old hotmail account instead yahoo I use in general. The site should be closed, and Lady sent to some Indian ‘hotel’ prison for some years, to learn some other trade. Streets of Calicutta, maybe, she seems to be pretty
Checked out Yaari, did what I know I’m not supposed to do — use the same pwd for this site. Yaari makes it look like you’re logging in after signing up and then grabs all the contacts and emails them, but makes it look like it’s from you. After this, won’t do that again.
Reported Gupta to the FTC. It’s a violation of the canned-spam act. Also notified Gandi.net that the site they host has done this and that since they’ve been notified, they could be in violation of USA rights as this guy is in the USA. Enough complaints to the FTC should get this guy trashed.
I feel like I have been abused by Yaari. I even made sure to uncheck every address but they still sent invites to all of them. I have written all about this abuse here: http://mkaihani.wordpress.com
yeah, the auto invite isn’t cool. i got an email today at work with an invite to yaari, and i assume that at least 50 of this poor guys work professional contacts did. that he has no choice in who is invited or how they use his contacts is a total violation of his privacy.
Everyone,
Are you all going to complain or are you going to DO SOMETHING?
Yaari’s practices are not just unethical they are ILLEGAL.
They contravene the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm
1) Go to the FTC page http://www.ftc.gov/spam/
Do you know the name of the company (Yes) (hit next)
2) Click on “File a Complaint” (on the left column).
It’s a bit slow so be patient.
3) Click on “FTC Complaint Assistant” (On the right)
4) Is your complaint concerning identity theft - NO (hit next)
5) Dissatisfaction with other Business Practices (hit next)
6) Select “Internet” and “Other Internet Practices” (hit next)
7) I have a complaint about my options (or lack of) for protecthing my privacy online. (you can also select option 1 if you have children in your email list). (hit next).
For the company details enter http://www.yaari.com. You can use Prerna@yaari.com for the email. (Just put zero dollars).
For Step 5, I put the following in the additional info
“This company is a social networking site. They contacted me by sending an invitation that impersonated the email identity of someone known to me. After signing up on their site http://www.yaari.com I found out that they take all of the addresses from my email address book and send invitation emails to each contact that claim to be from me. I believe that this practice contravenes the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act.”
– Please don’t just grumble. Make a difference: File a complaint with the FTC.
Tim
I recently received an email invitation for Yaari, and because I had never heard of it before, I decided to do some research first. After reading your blog, I can tell that Yaari is bad news. Thanks for the help!
I am not sure why major email services like yahoo, google & hotmail are not blacklisting yaari servers. Is there anything all of us can do to stop this nonsense ?
I was also gullible enough to fall for this. If you want to give them a piece of your mind, you can email the two founders at:
prerna@yaari.com
parag@yaari.com
In addition, Parag Chordia is a professor at Georgia Tech (I wonder how they feel about his side job?) and you can email him at his Georgia Tech address:
ppc@gatech.edu
parag.chordia@coa.gatech.edu
His home page is paragchordia.com
Then you can file a complaint at the FTC:
http://www.ftc.gov/spam/
And the Better Business Bureau:
atlanta.bbb.org
I have only one thing to say:
yaari owners are CRIMINALS!
Of course I unregistered as soon as I found out what was going on.
I don’t like Yaari.com, it is full of ads, and to be honest, there’s nothing unique about it. Why should I join? No Answer.
I want to know if http://www.PeopleForever.org is a trust-worthy site, as I really want to join in, but don’t know whether I can trust it. I have many friends there and no one has ever received a spam mail, but is that enough?
Rec’d an invitation w/the supposed sender’s name misspelled. Immediate clue…….conducted a search & came across this site. Then sent your link to the supposed sender b/c I have a sneaky suspicion that the deceit goes even deeper…..no one sends out invites w/their displayed name misspelled.
Really there is no way to Skip or avoid sending invites to all the people in your friend list!!!!I would not recommend anyone to register at this web site.