Quechup
social networking site
Quechup (kway-chup) was a social networking website that came to prominence in 2007 when it used automatic email invitations for viral marketing to all the e-mail addresses in its members' address books. This was described as a "spam campaign" and raised a great deal of criticism.
Address book harvesting
The automatic invitation of all the contacts in the e-mail address books of people who signed up to their service was controversial for two reasons:
Without explaining intentions, Quechup required permission to access the address book.
Invites were sent to all addresses in address books without permission of e-mail address owners.
This attracted a great deal of criticism in September 2007.
Reacting to the criticism, Quechup's parent company iDate Corporation made a public statement on 17 September 2007, stating that:
"Quechup was one of the first social networking sites to include such a feature back in 2005. With its growing popularity (social networks), expectations of what features a service should have and how they should work have emerged. Quechup's address check did not conform to what users now expect as the norm."
Much of the criticism focused on misleading users by hiding the nature of the feature in the 'small print' of the site terms and not specifying it in the Quechup privacy policy, which stated only, "You agree that we may use personally identifiable information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyse site usage, improve our content and product offerings, and customize our Site's content, layout, and services.".
While admitting the campaign was misleading, technology blogger Chris Hambly pointed out that text explaining how the feature worked was placed in normal print directly above the feature, raising the question of a user's responsibility to read what they agree to, although he noted that this explanatory text failed to clearly state what would happen.
However you view this, no matter what your opinion is on this the fact of the matter is that you should READ what the page says as it is very clear.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Quechup” is social networking site. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Quechup, social and networking, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “social networking site” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1240634. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007 and 2005.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quechup” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.