There has been a lot of press regarding New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s announcement yesterday that he intends to bring a lawsuit against Tagged.

We are dismayed that Cuomo’s office, which has shown itself to be fairly well-versed in the Internet, would issue an inaccurate and inflammatory accusation. We can only believe that they have not carefully reviewed the facts.

So here are the facts. Let them speak for themselves.

Tagged has not “raided” email address books, “stolen identities” or “spammed” millions of people. The descriptive analogy to “breaking into a home, stealing address books, and sending phony mail” to a person’s contacts is evocative, but it is not accurate.

The ”invite your friends” practice that the A/G’s office objects to has been standard practice among all top social networks for over five years. To compare this practice to “spam” or “identity theft” generates unnecessary alarm among consumers.

Like those social networks – including Facebook and MySpace – Tagged allows its users, if they choose, to import their email contacts from any of four popular email services (Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail or AOL Mail) to identify contacts that are already members of Tagged and to invite their contacts (including non-members) to join their network on Tagged.

The Attorney General asserts “Tagged did not clearly and conspicuously disclose to these members that these email invitations would be sent on their behalf.” The fact is that Tagged users are given clear notice at every step of the registration process, if they choose to import and invite their contacts they must affirmatively enter their email password and are able to choose which contacts they do not wish to invite before any email invitations are sent from Tagged on their behalf.

We began testing a new registration process, based on our popular Tags photo-sharing feature, in early June. Unfortunately, some members complained that they had inadvertently elected to send invitations to all the contacts they had uploaded. From this feedback we learned that, simply put, it was too easy for people to quickly go through the registration process and unintentionally invite their friends to join them on Tagged.

Upon receiving complaints, we stopped using this new registration process. We then emailed all new members who had sent invitations, explained that some people had unintentionally invited their contacts, and offered information on how to manage their contacts and, if they wanted, how to cancel their membership.

Let the facts speak for themselves. Here are screenshots of the registration and invite-a-friend process that Attorney General Cuomo has brought into question.

Cuomo’s statement goes on to assert that Tagged “made their invitational emails appear to have been sent directly from members’ personal email accounts, instead of from Tagged.com.” We believe the Attorney General is referring to the common practice of virtually all websites that offer an “invite- or forward-to-a-friend” option where the name and email address of the person who has chosen to forward content is used as the “From:” line. This is precisely the method used by companies such as The New York Times and by the New York State government itself. Tagged, in fact, clearly identifies itself as the sender of all emails, but some email service providers do not display full header information to email recipients as a default.

We appreciate that the Attorney General was forthcoming in noting that Tagged “suspended its email marketing campaign in June, in response to user complaints and criticism,” but failed to note that we did so quickly and voluntarily, and well before the Attorney General notified Tagged that it was conducting an inquiry of its business..

We are very confident that once the Attorney General considers all of the facts, we will be able to resolve this matter amicably.

Once again, we sincerely apologize for any embarrassment or frustration people experienced. Tagged is a place where tens of millions of people hang out with friends and meet new people. We have members who have met and now are best friends. We have members who met on Tagged and are now engaged or married. To those affected, I hope you will give us a second chance and join the millions of people who love Tagged and use it everyday.