8 ms·

Or how about the phony "people you may know". They suggested I may know my 4 year old Niece because somebody uploaded the email address created for her into th

by uptown 11y ago

Or how about the phony "people you may know". They suggested I may know my 4 year old Niece because somebody uploaded the email address created for her into their system. She definitely doesn't have a LinkedIn account, but they portray a profile-photoless "shadow profile" as-if she does.

snarfy 11y ago
> because somebody uploaded the email address You mean they scrapped it from your email account because you clicked on one of their links in your email.
pen2l 11y ago
That happens to me too. But you know who is a thousand times worse than Linkedin when it comes to these things? Facebook. At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.
- otoburb 11y ago
  How do they keep getting around your spam filters? Blocking the domain has worked well for me.
- resu_nimda 11y ago
  It would probably be pretty trivial to set up a filter or two to automatically delete those emails. Or maybe just leave your account open (though it sounds like you would refuse to do this on principle). I never receive emails from Facebook. I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"
  - pen2l 11y ago
    > I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa... I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.
    - alonmower 11y ago
      I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top) :(
      - pen2l 11y ago
        > I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
- __jal 11y ago
  Anything from a Facebook domain hitting my mail server is bounces them back to Facebook's abuse and postmaster addresses. I know categorically that it is abuse, because I am the sole user of my mail server and do not now and have never had a Facebook account, and have repeatedly asked them in various ways to stop spamming me. Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.
  - eli 11y ago
    That seems like it would make it harder for Facebook's abuse team to deal with actual abuse reports.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      Thereby resulting in facebook being a worse software for the average user due to their abuse of this one user. Win win for someone who doesn't like facebook.
    - __jal 11y ago
      I am making an actual abuse report.
      - Practicality 11y ago
        I am pretty sure a Facebook dev has already set up a rule on the abuse inbox to delete any emails coming from your domain.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        You'd probably have more luck marking them as spam in your client. If you're using a webmail service of any note, you're helping to train the filters used by others, and as a bonus, your own profile means you're less likely to get them in the inbox in the future. Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC. If you try to unsubscribe from an email list and your request is not honored, file a complaint with the FTC. via https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam
yelnatz 11y ago
I fell for this a couple of times. They grabbed my friends email and created a fake profile for her. When I clicked connect, I thought I would invite her to my network, but it ended up with an invite to LinkedIn to her email.
- gohrt 11y ago
  That is an invite to your network. The difference is that you were not aware of how interested in LinkedIn the contact was, and you were not aware you were ALSO inviting her to join LinkedIn
  - kbenson 11y ago
    The difference is that sending a request to someone within the social network to form a connection in that social network is different than sending an invite to someone's separate social network (email), which encourages them to join a whole new social network are two separate actions, and to represent one while doing the other is a bait-and-switch. This is a problem because they have separate social and cultural expectations, so you may feel comfortable doing one and not the other.
pc86 11y ago
If you read the button it's not an CTA to connect with her but a CTA to invite her to LinkedIn. She would then get an email basically saying "Uncle Uptown would like you to join LinkedIn!" Agree it's scummy and they are mixed in with actual folks on LinkedIn but they are not creating shadow profiles.
- uptown 11y ago
  This is on mobile. It shows her name, her email address, and a circular button with a human silhouette and a plus symbol on it. All in a section titled "People you may know". The implication is absolutely that she is a user of the site.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    IIRC there was one very subtle difference on mobile to differentiate users vs. non-users, but it was something easily overlooked. On desktop it's slightly more obvious, but still misleading IMO.
tedmiston 11y ago
The fact that they intermingle "add this person to my network" with "invite this person to LinkedIn" on that page drives me insane. I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses. Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"
- stephenboyd 11y ago
  When I signed up, I made the mistake of giving LinkedIn access to my Gmail address book. Somehow this meant they actually had access to a list of every person I had ever e-mailed, even if only once. So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.
  - justinclift 11y ago
    Hopefully you've learned something important about not giving your login credentials for any service, to another service. ;) [And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]
    - AJ007 11y ago
      Keep an eye on mobile apps that steal your address book.
    - jpetso 11y ago
      I signed up with an email alias specifically created for LinkedIn, and it still managed to associate my Facebook friends as possible connections. What the frick.
rspeer 11y ago
I see newer social networks that are taking the LinkedIn playbook and making it even worse. As a recovering academic, I find myself getting incredibly scummy e-mails from ResearchGate which actually purport to be from people I have done research with, putting their name as the sender, without that person even taking any action to send the e-mails. It's a spamming/phishing tactic that for some reason hasn't gotten them banned from the major e-mail services. How do I know that the person named in the e-mail is not choosing to send these e-mails? Someone I once did research with passed away last year, sadly. He started supposedly sending me ResearchGate invitations six months after he died.
- kale 11y ago
  ResearchGate seemed nice for a week. It showed every time a paper quoted one of mine, so it was a small confidence boost to know my older stuff is being read. Then they sent an e-mail with pictures of me, and said "are any of these people you?" Apparently RG thinks I need a photo so bad, it tried to search for one on the internet, and asked for confirmation. It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is creepy.
deadfriend 11y ago
A friend of mine died almost a decade ago before linkedin became a thing and I see those occasionally. Someone must have done the same for him.
- ShellfishMeme 11y ago
  Linkedin also wanted to connect me with my dead grandfather a few weeks after he died. I'm pretty sure he never had an account there. Felt a bit weird to have that email pop up suddenly.
T-hawk 11y ago
LinkedIn's "shadow profiles" are absolutely horrific. I deleted my LinkedIn account over five years ago, and hunted down every "no, really delete" option I could find on the site and in their emails. It didn't work. LinkedIn will still happily let users and recruiters find my old ghost profile and try to connect with it. I have quite a number of former co-workers who think they have a contact channel with me in LinkedIn even though it would never reach me. LinkedIn isn't just a nuisance, it's actively poisonous and dangerous. I'll be doing all my future job hunting on StackOverflow Careers, thanks.
itisbiz 11y ago
I scraped my 'people you may know' page over 30 days to make sure LinkedIn removed 2000 of my 'stolen contacts' from it. Once they did, 99% of them never appeared again. http://009co.com/?p=9 http://009co.com/?p=9

by uptown 11y ago

snarfy 11y ago

> because somebody uploaded the email address You mean they scrapped it from your email account because you clicked on one of their links in your email.

pen2l 11y ago

That happens to me too. But you know who is a thousand times worse than Linkedin when it comes to these things? Facebook. At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.

otoburb 11y ago
How do they keep getting around your spam filters? Blocking the domain has worked well for me.
resu_nimda 11y ago
It would probably be pretty trivial to set up a filter or two to automatically delete those emails. Or maybe just leave your account open (though it sounds like you would refuse to do this on principle). I never receive emails from Facebook. I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"
- pen2l 11y ago
  > I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfaces https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa... I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.
  - alonmower 11y ago
    I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top) :(
    - pen2l 11y ago
      > I've noticed a lot of user hostile behavior like this from all of the large public social companies (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc...) It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
__jal 11y ago
Anything from a Facebook domain hitting my mail server is bounces them back to Facebook's abuse and postmaster addresses. I know categorically that it is abuse, because I am the sole user of my mail server and do not now and have never had a Facebook account, and have repeatedly asked them in various ways to stop spamming me. Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.
- eli 11y ago
  That seems like it would make it harder for Facebook's abuse team to deal with actual abuse reports.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    Thereby resulting in facebook being a worse software for the average user due to their abuse of this one user. Win win for someone who doesn't like facebook.
  - __jal 11y ago
    I am making an actual abuse report.
    - Practicality 11y ago
      I am pretty sure a Facebook dev has already set up a rule on the abuse inbox to delete any emails coming from your domain.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      You'd probably have more luck marking them as spam in your client. If you're using a webmail service of any note, you're helping to train the filters used by others, and as a bonus, your own profile means you're less likely to get them in the inbox in the future. Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC. If you try to unsubscribe from an email list and your request is not honored, file a complaint with the FTC. via https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam

yelnatz 11y ago

I fell for this a couple of times. They grabbed my friends email and created a fake profile for her. When I clicked connect, I thought I would invite her to my network, but it ended up with an invite to LinkedIn to her email.

gohrt 11y ago
That is an invite to your network. The difference is that you were not aware of how interested in LinkedIn the contact was, and you were not aware you were ALSO inviting her to join LinkedIn
- kbenson 11y ago
  The difference is that sending a request to someone within the social network to form a connection in that social network is different than sending an invite to someone's separate social network (email), which encourages them to join a whole new social network are two separate actions, and to represent one while doing the other is a bait-and-switch. This is a problem because they have separate social and cultural expectations, so you may feel comfortable doing one and not the other.

pc86 11y ago

If you read the button it's not an CTA to connect with her but a CTA to invite her to LinkedIn. She would then get an email basically saying "Uncle Uptown would like you to join LinkedIn!" Agree it's scummy and they are mixed in with actual folks on LinkedIn but they are not creating shadow profiles.

uptown 11y ago
This is on mobile. It shows her name, her email address, and a circular button with a human silhouette and a plus symbol on it. All in a section titled "People you may know". The implication is absolutely that she is a user of the site.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  IIRC there was one very subtle difference on mobile to differentiate users vs. non-users, but it was something easily overlooked. On desktop it's slightly more obvious, but still misleading IMO.

tedmiston 11y ago

The fact that they intermingle "add this person to my network" with "invite this person to LinkedIn" on that page drives me insane. I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses. Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"

stephenboyd 11y ago
When I signed up, I made the mistake of giving LinkedIn access to my Gmail address book. Somehow this meant they actually had access to a list of every person I had ever e-mailed, even if only once. So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.
- justinclift 11y ago
  Hopefully you've learned something important about not giving your login credentials for any service, to another service. ;) [And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]
  - AJ007 11y ago
    Keep an eye on mobile apps that steal your address book.
  - jpetso 11y ago
    I signed up with an email alias specifically created for LinkedIn, and it still managed to associate my Facebook friends as possible connections. What the frick.

rspeer 11y ago

I see newer social networks that are taking the LinkedIn playbook and making it even worse. As a recovering academic, I find myself getting incredibly scummy e-mails from ResearchGate which actually purport to be from people I have done research with, putting their name as the sender, without that person even taking any action to send the e-mails. It's a spamming/phishing tactic that for some reason hasn't gotten them banned from the major e-mail services. How do I know that the person named in the e-mail is not choosing to send these e-mails? Someone I once did research with passed away last year, sadly. He started supposedly sending me ResearchGate invitations six months after he died.

kale 11y ago
ResearchGate seemed nice for a week. It showed every time a paper quoted one of mine, so it was a small confidence boost to know my older stuff is being read. Then they sent an e-mail with pictures of me, and said "are any of these people you?" Apparently RG thinks I need a photo so bad, it tried to search for one on the internet, and asked for confirmation. It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is creepy.

deadfriend 11y ago

A friend of mine died almost a decade ago before linkedin became a thing and I see those occasionally. Someone must have done the same for him.

ShellfishMeme 11y ago
Linkedin also wanted to connect me with my dead grandfather a few weeks after he died. I'm pretty sure he never had an account there. Felt a bit weird to have that email pop up suddenly.

T-hawk 11y ago

LinkedIn's "shadow profiles" are absolutely horrific. I deleted my LinkedIn account over five years ago, and hunted down every "no, really delete" option I could find on the site and in their emails. It didn't work. LinkedIn will still happily let users and recruiters find my old ghost profile and try to connect with it. I have quite a number of former co-workers who think they have a contact channel with me in LinkedIn even though it would never reach me. LinkedIn isn't just a nuisance, it's actively poisonous and dangerous. I'll be doing all my future job hunting on StackOverflow Careers, thanks.

itisbiz 11y ago

I scraped my 'people you may know' page over 30 days to make sure LinkedIn removed 2000 of my 'stolen contacts' from it. Once they did, 99% of them never appeared again. http://009co.com/?p=9 http://009co.com/?p=9