Inquiring minds wanted to know. So did I, so I went and checked.
The new version of Sociable now has code to offload your site configuration and other info (including your configured admin email address) and send it off to BlogPlay. Happens in two separate places/files in the code.
As stated in the plugin admin screen:
Check if you want help Sociable grow.
This information be used only to improve Sociable.
You accept send us your blog configuration and blog name
What they send off to sociablepixel.blogplay.com
$posts = array();
$posts[“blog_name”] = get_bloginfo();
$posts[“blog_url”] = get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’);
$posts[“admin_email”] = get_bloginfo(‘admin_email’);
$posts[“language”] = get_bloginfo(‘language’);
$posts[“version”] = get_bloginfo(‘version’);
$posts[“blog_config”] = $skyscraper_options;
Your blog config, URL, sociable config, your email address.
The good thing for BlogPlay is that they actually give you a choice. The bad is that they never tell you that they take your email address away with the other information.
OFFLOADING PEOPLE’s email addresses without telling them is BOGUS.
I HATE THIS ONE.. My email addresses in blogs are special aliases used for only that, and I would NEVER sign up to have it offloaded without me knowing it, and potentially used for ANY random purpose..
There is NO logical reason for anyone to offload email addresses from blog configurations other than wanting to start sending unsolicited email. Whether the addresses are kept internally or in the worst case shared/sold.
(I am NOT implying that BlogPlay would ever sell these addresses. But they are for sure not picking up email addresses without wanting to send unsolicited email to them at some point.)
SI-contact-form got kicked off all my sites when they started doing this and advertising Spam from vCita suddenly started arriving to the magic tracker address they offloaded from my system, and Sociable just went the same way. Off my systems.
Fortunately I never upgraded to this new, magic version. Glad I checked before upgrading.
