Thousands of 'Private' Careerbuilder 'Monk-e-mails' Viewable By All
CareerBuilder, the job site that has a love affair with chimps, has had a feature called Monk-email for a while that lets people create video messages to send to their friends. Usually when companies engage in this sort of send-a-message-to-a-friend thing, the assumption is that the message will be private and only viewed by the intended recipient. Well, it seems that's not the case with CareereBuilder's Monk-e-mail. As Adrants reader Taariq Lewis tells us, one can very easily view any of the thousands of the individually created messages simply by changing a few of the numbers in the URL.
The site, powered by Oddcast, simply creates an un-secured URL to be sent to the intended friend leading them to the message. No where on the site does it say the message will be secure but, even though the messages are not personally identifiable, it might be a bit disconcerting to some if they knew their message could be viewed by anyone who wanted to fool around with the link. All you have to do to view messages is change the X's in the "mid=75xxxxxx" portion of the URL. You can start with this one but make sure you're wearing headphones unless your co-workers don't mind swearing.
Comments
NONSTORY! Booooooooooo!
That's silliness. This is a story - there are implications for consumer security with new media.
So many agencies are launching things like e-cards, etc. that it needs to be understood that in some cases they may be viewable by others.
As well - what is the effect on the CareerBuilder Brand to have people looking at the monkeys talking about well, you know, what that video was talking about.
We all know that people are going to make rude things with it - I certainly did - and sent it to my coworkers, but when anyone can view rude stuff...
Anyway - it is a story. Implications abound for other projects and the trend of consumer generated media in a brand's framework. Same as GM make your own ad - I could make GM ads with bad words in them, or talking about how there's lots of room in the back for sex, etc. and others can view...
I fail to see how you would write anything of much consequence on a monkey mail...
But we could give it a burl and write something really personal then sue them for making it public.
It's more the priniciple of the thing - and the trend that it stands for.
Obviously no one is going to expose their personal life in 160 characters or whatever you can type in - but for other things like ecards it becomes an issue.
The EQUALLY important issue is that you can access lots of profane, lewd BRANDED material. It's one thing when someone sends it to you, and another when you can just browse it.
Mainly something to think about. It's not a huge news story in itself... But you can infer things from with the power of critical thinking, I think Steve doesn't need to spell broader implications of everything out for us
What they should have done is obtained permission, ran a contest with those that gave permission and created a viral site out of the whole darn thing. Now, they just look stupid.
I just wanted to thank you for a great time waster. Check out this crazy guy...
http://www.careerbuilder.com/monk-e-mail/Default.aspx?mid=7581127&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=d519d9aab7a947a39e82c03d8432a82b-198723672-TO-1
thanks for the nice work:) a nice site