Frienditto

[rm]

From several of my friends -- all of this is via them, as I've had NO DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE SITE, but feel this meritted enough concern to repost here:

Watch out for Frienditto.

This site is an archive service that claims affiliation with Live Journal BUT DOES NOT HAVE IT.

There has been some concern over this site and security of LJ accounts. If you provide it with your login information for your Live Journal you give this service permission to archive your friends only entries and ANY locked entries of your friends for which you have access.

Please read the following answer to my support request regarding this site and be informed. More importantly, inform others.

Dear user,

Frienditto is not affiliated with LiveJournal in any way. As such, this website does not have access to any entries which are not publicly viewable. If someone provides them with their LiveJournal username and password, however, it gives this site access to all non-public entries that account would have access to. We can only recommend that you do not provide your username and password to any person or website to ensure the security of your account.

Additionally, if you believe anyone on your Friends list may have provided their login information to this website, we can only advise that you remove them from your Friends list. This website will have access to your Friends-only entries as long as any person on your Friends list has given the site access. If any content is present on Frienditto which you do not wish to be there, you will need to resolve the issue with that website.

Regards,

Scott
LiveJournal Abuse Team

(Emphasis mine)


If you are using this site I will remove you from my friends list. Additionally, I will be extraordinarily cross at you, either for being an idiot, or a malicious little freak.

Comments

[delchi.livejournal.com]

Just took a look. The concerns are completely valid, and if you look at a historical record of their web site, they have changed the verbage to cover up what once was.

The main point, that being that you are releasing your user id and password , thus granting access to a 3rd party to all things you have access to is absolutely true. I would not give out my uid/pw to a 3rd party. Ever. Ever.

There are several broken source archiving packages out there that don't involve giving up your info to anyone.

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

They don't save your user info.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

They do have it though, and they use it to access things that other people have entrusted you with, and make them public.

Does it matter if they save it or not, if they use it? Is there any evidence that they do not save it? Mayhap they use a cooke for association purposes? Repeat use? Just because they claim it does not make it so.

Here's an interesting theory - what if they dont save you LJ user id and password. What if they filter your entries for email addresses to harvest for sapm.

Do you see a privacy policy posted on their site? I don't.

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

That's why I'm not an asshole and don't post friends-only entries. If someone is abusing someone else's trust like that, they deserve what's coming to them. If someone's stupid enough to give out their username/password, they deserve what's coming to them. And if Frienditto wasn't around, they'd just find some other way to be an asshole. It's so easy to avoid the whole Frienditto thing if you're just, shock and gasp, not an asshole or a dramamonger.

At any rate, I doubt they got an actual lawyer to go over their site policy. What kind of lawyer would allow "plz" to be posted in a serious site policy?

[txt-eva.livejournal.com]

That's why I'm not an asshole and don't post friends-only entries.

How does posting friends only make you an arsehole?

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

I meant posting them on Frienditto; sorry I wasn't more clear.

[txt-eva.livejournal.com]

Oh right okies...
(is only mostly friend locked after my dad found my livejournal...not of good)

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

Heh, my journal is largely friends-only as well. :)

[(Anonymous)]

yeah, they couldn't possibly be saving your user info. people on the internet told us so. people who troll journals and brag about encouraging suicide for fun told us so. i mean, gee, why would you think a bunch of people who say they like to fuck with lj users would go and fuck with lj users?

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

Come back to me when you have an account.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, they do. See screenshot taken from the creator of frienditto's journal here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/antifrienditto/402.html). He specificly says they will claim not to but they will anyway.

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

Christ, there's already an antifrienditto community? WTF?

The solution is simple: don't be a goddamn asshole and frienditto friends-only posts. Those who do deserve what they get.

By the way, please have the balls to post your opinion beneath your own name. It's only courtesy.

[blonnie.livejournal.com]

i don't understand what you're saying. how is that a simple solution? from what i'm reading, even if -i- don't frienditto friends-only posts.... anyone else on my friends list COULD and thus, the frienditto site would access my lj, correct? i'm not trying to be mean/rude.. i am just trying to understand what this thing is all about. i'm hearing conflicting info from the two sides.

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

They wouldn't have access to your LJ. They'd have access to the one post that your 'friend' entered the URL to. If you entered YOUR username and password to the site in order to rat out a friend, you'd deserve whatever was coming to you, just as the 'friend' who entered his username and password would deserve whatever was coming to him.

The Frienditto crew says they don't save usernames/passwords, but there is a screencap floating around of Jameth in a friends-locked posts going "WE'LL TELL THEM WE DON'T SAVE THEIR USERNAME AND PASSWORD BUT WE'LL DO IT ANYWAY AND DOMINATE THE WORLD." It sounds to me like he's joking, but the "ditto cops" freak out anyway.

I don't think it's worth worrying about, at least not in my case. I don't particularly have anything to hide.

[blonnie.livejournal.com]

i don't have 'much' to hide but i have family issues and the only thing that would bother me is if some how they kind of spidered out and cached my entire lj so that people could find it elsewhere -un-friendsonly. (for instance, by searching google and finding the frienditto site w/all of my friends only posts. but from what you're saying - that isn't the case.

[amasaglajax.livejournal.com]

yeah, according to subbes the software isn't capable of doing that.