3 ms·

There’s actually quite a bit of data that’s viewable to anyone, logged in or not, that’s public. All we did was speed up what was happening anyway. Sales people

There’s actually quite a bit of data that’s viewable to anyone, logged in or not, that’s public. All we did was speed up what was happening anyway. Sales people all across the world copy and paste data from LinkedIn to sales force every day. They either do it manually, using the app I worked on, or one of the literally hundreds of competitors.

behringer 7y ago
If there are literally hundreds of competitors why would we need you also being a jerk?
yeahitslikethat 7y ago
Requiring it to be done manually is exactly the point.
msh 7y ago
So the argument is that you are abiding their days because other people are also doing it.... Great morality...
- rangersanger 7y ago
  There's no moral issue here. Sales people are going in and copying and pasting data field by field, and we made that process more efficient. All that software did is replace multiple clicks with one. Scrape the DOM and dump it into their salesforce instance. A sales person still needs to initiate the action. I'm happy to admit that I don't like sales people, I don't like cold calls, and what we did made it slightly more efficient for them to cold call people. But calling it a/immoral or an invasion of privacy is silly, unless you've already established that cold calls are immoral and I missed that.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  If you don't want your data scraped for collection, you wouldn't put it on Linkedin. Really the only argument is, is it more moral for Linkedin to do it instead of a plugin?
SkyBelow 7y ago
>All we did was speed up what was happening anyway. I can think of a number of crimes where this statement is also true, so I'm not so certain it serves as an adequate defense.
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
I disagree with your implicit assumption that automated access is equivalent to a person viewing the data. Scale changes the results. Technology is making things possible at scales and economies that were not viable before, and people are slow to adjust. It's one thing to have police stationed at a bus stop, waiting for a suspect to emerge. It's another to network facial recognition cameras across a city or country and log the motions of the entire population. It's one thing to greet people in a grocery store and offer coupons for your product. It's another to (as discussed a couple days ago) install Bluetooth beacons in a variety of stores, install trojan packages in popular phone apps, and track people moving through stores. It's one thing to browse LinkedIn for a person's profile, read the bio of an interesting candidate, and email them. It's another to slurp up 2000 candidates and send an email to all of them.

behringer 7y ago

If there are literally hundreds of competitors why would we need you also being a jerk?

yeahitslikethat 7y ago

Requiring it to be done manually is exactly the point.

msh 7y ago

So the argument is that you are abiding their days because other people are also doing it.... Great morality...

rangersanger 7y ago
There's no moral issue here. Sales people are going in and copying and pasting data field by field, and we made that process more efficient. All that software did is replace multiple clicks with one. Scrape the DOM and dump it into their salesforce instance. A sales person still needs to initiate the action. I'm happy to admit that I don't like sales people, I don't like cold calls, and what we did made it slightly more efficient for them to cold call people. But calling it a/immoral or an invasion of privacy is silly, unless you've already established that cold calls are immoral and I missed that.
notfromhere 7y ago
If you don't want your data scraped for collection, you wouldn't put it on Linkedin. Really the only argument is, is it more moral for Linkedin to do it instead of a plugin?

SkyBelow 7y ago

>All we did was speed up what was happening anyway. I can think of a number of crimes where this statement is also true, so I'm not so certain it serves as an adequate defense.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

I disagree with your implicit assumption that automated access is equivalent to a person viewing the data. Scale changes the results. Technology is making things possible at scales and economies that were not viable before, and people are slow to adjust. It's one thing to have police stationed at a bus stop, waiting for a suspect to emerge. It's another to network facial recognition cameras across a city or country and log the motions of the entire population. It's one thing to greet people in a grocery store and offer coupons for your product. It's another to (as discussed a couple days ago) install Bluetooth beacons in a variety of stores, install trojan packages in popular phone apps, and track people moving through stores. It's one thing to browse LinkedIn for a person's profile, read the bio of an interesting candidate, and email them. It's another to slurp up 2000 candidates and send an email to all of them.