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UNYK shortcomings
Recently I received a series of invitations to join UNYK, an interesting relationship site. Its focus is an automatically updated contact list: when your contacts update their details, your contact list is automatically updated, and vice-versa. Given the nature of the information, I was worried about privacy/confidentiality and data openness, so I did a little web search.
On the confidentiality issue, the UNYK Terms of Service states that UNYK reserves the right to modify or update its Terms of Service or Privacy Policy at any time and without prior notice. By using the site, you agree to all revisions or modifications. The confidentiality is supposedly “verified” by a company called TRUSTe. According to the Wikipedia, the TRUSTe president co-founded of Match.com, which bought Netclub, which was founded by the UNYK president. The TRUSTe article on Wikipedia links to two articles criticizing TRUSTe’s verifications, although the author admittedly works for the competition.
On the openness issue, I couldn’t find instructions on how to export contacts, e. g. as vCard. Besides, it seems that only UNYK users can be part of your contact list. According the the UNYK Privacy Policy, canceling your registration will delete all your information from UNYK and the address books of your contacts.
Since I bought my cellphone (a Nokia 2630), I back up my data systematically. Someday I’ll start synchronizing it to Evolution, but for now it’s good enough. I would adopt UNYK only if it made it easier, not harder, to keep other contact lists.
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17 de August de 2008 às 22:19
They also store your password in plain text and send it to you by e-mail if you forget it. That’s really not a company you should rely on.
18 de August de 2008 às 07:55
20 de August de 2008 às 13:14
Thanks Leonardo and Luciana, I nearly subscribed.
20 de August de 2008 às 17:18
Hi Leonardo,
Thanks for your comments on unyk. I would like to clarify a few points.
Concerning the terms of use, we really tried to come with the best terms to protect unyk users and unyk.
The TRUSTe certificate means that we are respecting high industry standards in terms of how we manage our user’s information. Trust me, there is absolutely no relation between netclub match and truste, I know, I founded netclub and unyk. We are just trying to provide a good service to our users.
On the openness issue, we are all about openness. We think that your contacts are your contacts and you should be able to export them wherever you want. So if you go in your address book you will see that you can easily export some or all of your contacts in a csv file . We will have full sync capability with most address book and mobile phones in a near future.
If you delete your account, we will not erase your information from your contacts address book, they will simply stop receiving your updates. But it’s a good point, thanks for mentioning it, it is a bug and we will fix it.
For the password issue, we expect our users to change their password after they have received it but Luciana is right it is not top and we will upgrade our process.
Stick with us, we have some great releases coming soon and we really want to make it easier for you to manage and access your contacts from wherever you want.
Cheers
Sebastien
26 de August de 2008 às 18:52
[...] Sebastien: Hi Leonardo, Thanks for your comments on unyk. I would like to clarify a few points. Concerning the terms… [...]
7 de January de 2009 às 23:37
Leonardo,
Thanks for posting this information. Had you joined, you would have discovered a few more shortcomings. Namely, that the contacts list for the email address you register is automatically sent invitations! I signed up for UNYK and invitations were sent to people I had no intention of contacting, mush less giving all my information to. When I contacted the company to complain, I got no response. I cancelled my account and the friends who had not yet joined UNYK are still getting emails. I am now getting nasty emails from friends asking why I keep sending them invitation after invitation. I have contacted the company to ask them to deal with this issue and have not yet heard back. I would not recommend this site to anyone.
Molly
12 de February de 2009 às 05:45
Leo and team,
A further note on security for UNYK can be read here:
http://www.nslms.com/2008/12/22/unyk-address-book/
Basically the author shows that the site is using insecure technologies which can be compromised by spammers or worse.
At this writing, I am unaware if this has been fixed although the author of the article posted this in Dec ‘08.
Excerpt:
“Since I was more than a little bit surprised that there was no secure access to login and supply my credential for other services, I did a little further digging. UNYK insists in their privacy policy that they encrypt any “sensitive data” that goes across the wire. … So, since it looked like they used a lot of Web 2.0 technologies I thought possibly they were doing some javascript magic to encrypt the stuff going across the wire, I did a little test with Wireshark to see what got sent. I bit the bullet and imported my gmail contacts, and this was the result, with the password obscured by me, of course.”
.
Randall
9 de March de 2009 às 10:28
I never leave my email password to anybody else. I was invited, for example, to join the “Good Tree”. I immediately became suspicious when I was asked for my Gmail password! And now, the UNYK! If I subscribe to any other service in the internet, like the Wikipedia or CNet, I never use my email password as the password for that service or site. Imagine how easy it would be for them to log in to your email just by using the password you just entered upon registration! It is bad enough that our emails will never be fool-proof to determined hackers, but I don’t see any point making their task easier. Thanks to Leonardo and to all of you, too! Muito Obrigado!