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Ask HN: Has anyone else had work emails spammed by Meta?
Today I received a recruiting email from meta that was CC'd to every email I have used in the past decade, including a defunct company I worked for and my current work email (which luckily, was wrong at least). It appears Meta's recruiters are using data from their shadow profile on me to blast every possible email. Has anyone else had this experience? Is there some legal way for me to force them to remove me from their system?
- easton 4y agoIt's not a shadow profile, they're scraping your LinkedIn. I've gotten multiple emails to my work email from (non-Facebook) recruiters/sales people within the first week of adding my current employment to LinkedIn. They guess it's "first.last@companydomain", and most of the time that's right. It happened that one of the times they put an unsubscribe link at the bottom, but if they didn't I just sent them to junk. (The way to market new infrastructure tooling is not to cold-email people that've worked here for a month.)
- vorpalhex 4y agoThey also buy your old linkedIn data from brokers.. which is unfortunate. I usually send a precanned speel if they keep following up - "If it would be rude on a dating app, it's rude in professional email. Take the no and stop contacting me."
- mh- 4y ago> The way to market new infrastructure tooling is not to cold-email people that've worked here for a month. This should be day 1 in outbound sales training. I don't understand how folks can think this is the right time to try to sell. A couple weeks into a job at a new company, I doubt I even know what we use now that you're trying to sell me a replacement for. One concise cold email introducing yourself, I'll probably save it for later if it looks compelling. But multiple "needy" follow-up replies can leave a really poor first impression.
- buildbot 4y agoI deleted my linkedin some time ago, and it never had these contact details.
- tjpnz 4y agoThis hasn't happened to me. But one of their recruiters was kind enough to subscribe me to their jobs newsletter. Given that it's Meta I wouldn't have expected anything less.
- daneel_w 4y agoThey've sent me a few to the e-mail address I registered my Facebook account with. They got my job title correct despite my account being "galvanically" isolated from exactly everything relating to my work, incl. not associating with colleagues. LinkedIn is likely the indirect source.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago>despite my account being "galvanically" isolated from exactly everything relating to my work, incl. not associating with colleagues. really underestimating the amount of data they have to correlate. Ip, geo, etc.
- daneel_w 4y agoI'm fully aware of exactly how much data they have access to. My rare name is on its own a complete and unique match.
- buildbot 4y agoYeah I deleted my linkedin some time ago though, and it did not have several of these emails they used.
- lucideer 4y agoYup
- ageitgey 4y agoLinkedIn scraping for Recruiter/SaaS sales spam is annoying. But we've seen a similar but more critical issue with phishing attacks based on LinkedIn scraping. When a new employee joins the company, they will start getting texts to their personal phone number "from the CEO" asking them to handle an emergency by accessing a link or sending a file or whatever. It seems to happen right after they update LinkedIn with their new job. We also get email-based versions, but those are usually easy to block. It's frequent enough now that we warm each person about it specifically as part of our initial welcome email and tell them to expect it.