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It's not required for you to give LinkedIn access to your contacts for them to know you're connected with someone else. * Your friend may have given LinkedIn a
by jmathai 9y ago
It's not required for you to give LinkedIn access to your contacts for them to know you're connected with someone else.
* Your friend may have given LinkedIn access to their contacts and now LinkedIn will start spamming you to connect with them.
* You have a friend-a and friend-b who both gave LinkedIn access to their contacts. You're in friend-a's contacts but not in friend-b's. LinkedIn can assume there's higher than random chance that you know friend-b. LinkedIn will probably try to spam both of you to connect with one another. Why not, right?
* You have a friend-a and friend-b and friend-c who all gave LinkedIn access to their contacts and you're on all 3 but none of them are in each others. LinkedIn will probably try and spam all 4 of you to add each other.
There's prolly plenty more and a team at LinkedIn focusing on just this. Anyone else care to add clever ways to infer connections?
- prlambert 9y agoI was the PM for this at Twitter. You pretty much nailed it. The straight Address Book algorithms are Reverse Address Book (your #1) and Strong-ties prediction (your #2 and #3). LinkedIn for sure also uses common groups (schools, workplaces, interests, etc), and geolocation in their recos. There's also sneakier signals like app graph and browsing history, though in my experience those were more useful for content recos than people recos.
- oridecon 9y agoDo big companies buy 3rd party databases that they can cross link data or is it easier to build your own with linkedin patterns?
- prlambert 9y agoThey would if they could and it was clean/legal. But there are very few purchasable databases that make a dent at Twitter or LinkedIn scale. This line of thinking was behind the original motivation for Digits (part of the Fabric SDK). Get developers to collect Address Books for us, in return they get a free SMS-based verification service.
- compsciphd 9y agoalso leave out syncing your android device to linkedin by using the android app and not paying close attention. won't have any visible contacts access online.