

SMS Spam from a Y Combinator Company? - wdr1

This morning (at 2am!) I started to get a bunch of text messages from a domain called "theflockapp.com."<p>There's no opt-out &#38; no way to tell them to stop texting me (especially at 2am!).<p>I checked their FAQ &#38; couldn't find anything there:
https://theflockapp.com/faq<p>However, I surprised to find that it's an app created by a Y Combinator company, as the FAQ links to their team page:
http://bu.mp/company/ourteam<p>The link in their text spam only takes me to download their app.<p>The best I can figure, is that to get them <i>not</i> to spam me, I have to 1) download their and 2) give them access to my Facebook account.<p>For reals?<p>PG or anyone else, could someone please ask them to knock this type of behavior off?  It really does seem over the line.
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david_lieb
Hi all, this is Dave, CEO of Bump (we make Flock). Just saw this thread, and
though I've personally emailed with wdr1 already, I wanted to give everyone
here the details.

These are not automated text messages coming from our servers. And they are
not automated invites sent on behalf of users when they sign up for Flock.
_They are intentional invitations sent directly by a real user._

The flow is: 1) User navigates to the Invite Friends page 2) User sees all her
friends in her address book on her iPhone and taps on the ones she wishes to
invite (phone numbers are shown below each friend) 3) User taps "Invite"
button 4) User is taken to the native SMS UI with the contacts she chose in
the To: field, which is editable, along with the link to download Flock,
again, which is editable. 5) User must press "Send" on the SMS UI to send text
messages to those friends.

You can see screenshots here: <https://bu.mp/aPGzVZ>

We've tried to make this flow as explicit and intentional as possible while
giving existing Flock users a tool to invite their friends to use the app as
well.

If there are examples of apps that do this better than we do, we'd love to
hear about them so we can improve the flow.

-dave @ theflockapp.com

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wdr1
Also, here's a screengrab of some of the texts: <http://imgur.com/8wNav>

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calbear81
I'm guessing someone you know who has you in their phonebook downloaded the
app and then it has one of those aggressive "send this download link to all my
friends" type of thing and it's created a chain reaction where you have shared
friends who then hit you when they sign up and so forth and so forth.

~~~
ohashi
That seems like quite a plausible explanation. However, it's a really
scumbaggy and scammy move, especially without an obvious opt-out.

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dangrossman
Reply with "STOP". That's supposed to be the universal "get me off this list"
for SMS, though a bad actor might ignore it.

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redegg
So you want someone else to send an email to them?

Their email is clearly listed on the footer: support@theflockapp.com.

~~~
wdr1
No, I want them to give an opt out or, ideally, stop this behavior all
together.

