I contacted Huminity and got this response:

Dear Jon,

Thank you for pointing to us that some people have hard feelings about Huminity.
 
The Huminity initiative is a free initiative, and we therefore see it as our moral obligation to inform all contacts that are included by users. This is done by a one-time notification in which these contacts are presented the means of asking to be removed, with or without a consent from the user that has included them in his/her contact-tree. These contacts are in no way on any Huminity Mailing list, and as stated before, we see it as our moral obligation to inform these contacts.
 
We do not hide the fact that we notify the contacts in the installation, and in our website, both under Software, and under Privacy, and of-course in the User Agreement. Moreover, we specifically delay the sending of e-mails from the user's first log-in into the Huminity Network. During this time, a user can remove any contact that he/she wishes, or ultimately remove all his/her contacts, and those contacts that are removed do not receive an e-mail notification.

We in Huminity take the privacy issue very seriously. As a company that prides in being “community friendly” we have given great thought about protecting the privacy of our users and contacts. Among the steps we took:

User
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* Data kept: contacts, name and free text (which can be changed or removed at any time by the user), and user’s email address (which is fixed, and the user can decide if this address will be seen by other users or not). Since this data is not more sensitive than the data contained by any regular e-mail that is sent by a user, and moreover it can include nickname or no free-text at all, and can be changed by the user at ant time, we feel that the user’s has full control over these fields and privacy is not harmed.
* User can choose to disclose or not to disclose his/hers email
* User can choose to disclose or not to disclose if online
* When user uninstalls the software, the default is that his/her record and contacts are erased from the database (unless he/she wishes to leave the contacts since the user connects though several computers for example).

Contacts
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* Emails of contacts are not disclosed on the map to no-one.
* Contacts are notified by a one-time email notification about their inclusion in the Huminity network. We see it as our obligation to notify contacts of their inclusion in the network and allow them at their own will to be delisted. Though this item is sometimes considered wrongly as SPAM by users and contacts, we think that it would be inconceivable NOT to notify contacts about their inclusion, even by their friends.

General
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*Access to the servers and database is granted to few
*We don’t have spyware
*We don’t use cookies

We hope this explains the logic concerning the issues that were raised.

Kind regards,
The Huminity Team