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How did this "Connections in the news" feature use a person's name and surname to uniquely identify them? This is appallingly asinine, as this example indicates
by daniel-levin 10y ago
How did this "Connections in the news" feature use a person's name and surname to uniquely identify them? This is appallingly asinine, as this example indicates. My name is as generic as they come, and so this is a risk for me. I wonder if LinkedIn were to group its members by name and count them, how many people (excluding those not on LinkedIn) would actually be uniquely determined by a name/surname combo? A quick search for "William Johnson" yields 7,476 results. Why didn't LinkedIn even ask this guy to confirm if he was indeed that William Johnson in the news? What an absolute fuck-up.
- jrockway 10y agoYou know you're in trouble when the TSA does something better than you.
- redler 10y ago> ask this guy to confirm if he was indeed that William Johnson I think they now ask recipients of new endorsements to confirm before they're posted. So asking for a confirmation on something as potentially damaging as a news link should be the least they do here -- and the work would be trivial (in the mathematical sense).
- danielweber 10y agoDid all 7486 William Johnsons on LinkedIn have that sent out to their contacts? The top William Johnson on my LinkedIn page is black. I wonder if the algorithm cared about the race of the guy in the photo before sending out the mail. In some ways that would be even worse.
- a3n 10y agoI don't remember: they don't ask your race on LI, do they? And let's hope, hope hope that they aren't doing facial analysis of photos for something that is absolutely irrelevant.
- philwelch 10y agoI used to have a coworker named Jack Ma. LinkedIn is now my source of all news about Alibaba.