Ru-oh. Is this how YouTube pays for its massive bandwidth? If so, expect interest in YouTube to fall away drastically. I hope not. Plaxo is not the worst company in the online world, but I tend to mark all communication from Plaxo as spam.
BoingBong- Share a YouTube video = share your friend's email with Plaxo?
While debugging why YouTube videos are not working on one of my PCs, I tried the 'Share' link to try to get to the URL. In the popup that appeared, the NoScript extension was blocking some JavaScript. Clicking on the button to enable the code revealed that the JavaScript was hosted at -- gasp -- Plaxo (no linkee for them), the company that enlists its users to send spamalicious address book related emails. So from the looks of it, when you share a YouTube video with your friends, you may be unwittingly adding your friends' email addresses to Plaxo's databases. Slick. Or, should I say, slimy. At least it appears so. There is no confirmation that this is what is happening, but it certainly does look suspicious.
Update, per “an engineer at Plaxo”, nothing to be worried about.
YouTube is using our Address Book Access Widget so their users can easily pick people from their hotmail/gmail/outlook/etc address books to send video links to. It’s completely optional and no personal info is sent to Plaxo when our JavaScript loads on YouTube’s page. Furthermore, all the data we pass through as a result of using the widget is dropped as soon as the user is done selecting contacts. Lots of other sites are also using our widget (zazzle, break.com, etc.) so they don’t have to write their own auto-importers for the myriad address book services out there.
Wow, the more I read about all there is out there, the more ignoramous I feel. I am relieved, though. Just to think I could have been passing my friends unwanted stuff or info of theirs to somewhere else was really freaky.