Today I received a press release from Reunion.com notifying me that they had successfully added a whopping 1.6 million new members in June, beating out LinkedIn according to comScore. This is nothing compared to the more 9 million added by Facebook in the same month but Reunion.com is in another class. So how did they get the boost in traffic?

As I’ve previously covered, Reunion.com spams the friends of everybody that joins the site. It encourages users to check their email contact list to see if their friends are on the site. If their friends aren’t on the site it automatically sends an email to their contact list without notifying the users. This is a standard tactic which has been used countless times including by Plaxo which initially grew their user base with aggressive spam tactics.

As I wrote earlier this month, this isn’t the only violation of privacy that Reunion.com has made. As one article put it, “Reunion.com’s privacy policy says the site ‘prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13.’ But that doesn’t address the site’s own data-gathering.”

There is a very good chance that all of these privacy violations, regardless of the company’s remarkable growth is going to result in a lawsuit. According to sources of mine, there are individuals that are looking to sue the company for overly aggressive marketing techniques. The funny thing is how public Reunion.com’s tactics are. Perhaps this is one thing that would protect them in court.

If you Google “Reunion.com”, the first page contains multiple articles referencing the company’s email spam tactics. Growth is great for the company but sacrificing user privacy and user trust to grow your company isn’t a solid long-term strategy.

In the social networking industry, the single most important factor for building user trust is strict control over their privacy. It looks like Reunion.com continues to break their users’ trust. Back in May I wrote about Reunion.com spam tactics. An article in LA Times highlights yet another privacy violation by Reunion.com.

This time around the company paid a third-party for a massive user database which ended up including the data of minors, one of which was only 4-years old. According to the article, “Reunion.com’s privacy policy says the site ‘prohibits registration by and will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 13.’ But that doesn’t address the site’s own data-gathering.”

The data may not have come from their recent user database acquisition though. Instead a Reunion.com supervisor suggested that the information probable came from “state vaccination records or from the Centers for Disease Control.” Wherever the data came from it can be shocking to see the information of your family members who aren’t members of the site showing up within your profile thanks to the help of third-party data.

Oregon State officials stated that this information is technically not public and that Reunion.com’s assertion was completely inaccurate. I think I smell a lawsuit coming. The company appears to be in the business of aggregating profiles of individuals created by third-party data providers whether or not those individuals are actually users. If there is one company that is good at building a bad reputation, I would say Reunion.com is.

Have you had any bad experiences with the company?

Plaxo.com, the company acquired last week by Comcast for a rumored $160 million, was launched back in 2001. The company faced heavy criticism for aggressive spam techniques which used user contact lists to send out false invites to users. Reunion.com has decided to leverage a similar tactic in hopes of rapidly expanding their user base.

While the tactics have appeared to work (based on Alexa statistics), this strategy is not a long-term solution and is a quick way to lose users faster than you gain them. Take a look at the screenshot below from a search for “Reunion.com” on Summize. The majority of comments are from angry people complaining about how Reunion.com abused users’ trust.

Only one of the users thought it was a genuine email but chose not to respond to it because he prefers to communicate via Facebook and Twitter. Screw using Facebook to spread your website or application virally, you can import peoples’ Gmail contact list and spam the hell out of them! Honestly, this has to be one of the most misleading tactics for a website to leverage.

Following stagnant growth through February it appears that the site decided to take drastic measures. Unfortunately those measures are going to end up backfiring. Reunion.com staff: drop the spam tactics or witness a mass exodus from your site. Then again I’d guess that the exodus has already begun taking place as users move to Facebook.

Have you received these emails? Do you see any benefit of using these tactics?

Sample Email 1

Sample Email 2

Twitter Search Screenshot