A lot of people (myself included) don’t trust this function, because these companies have the potential to steal your password and hack your account.

can’t help you with the other part, sorry!

This is an interesting question. I use www.goodreads.com as a book discussion list, and they offer to search your e-mail contacts to see who on my list is also a member of Goodreads and add them to my friends list. I’ve been leery of doing this, not only because it could compromise my own e-mail but because it seems like a violation of my friends’ privacy. Many of my e-mail contacts are work related, and I would not want to mix social and business without personally asking them if they were interested. And I would be worried third parties capturing my password from the site.

Am I overreacting?

@PandoraBoxx – I don’t think so. I use gmail and it automatically saves every contact/email address you’ve emailed or have been emailed by. There are a lot of people that I don’t even know in that list, and with these types of “services”, I have to uncheck a LOT of boxes (or inversely, have to scan through the list to carefully only check a few boxes).

And with so many facebook accounts being hacked into recently, I’m definitely not going to give a website my email password again.