That's a good point. I'll keep that in mind. I'm still hesitant to feel like it explains everything -- in 2007, LinkedIn still didn't seem that ubiquitous (af

That's a good point. I'll keep that in mind. I'm still hesitant to feel like it explains everything -- in 2007, LinkedIn still didn't seem that ubiquitous (after all, FB was then just opening itself up to non-college students, and LinkedIn's target demog. was still the pre-internet generation). So there weren't a whole lot of people I knew on the site to begin with, and there wasn't anybody I knew in common on LinkedIn connecting me to at least 2 of the vaguely familiar people I knew. And those 2 people started getting suggested to me by the site at the same time -- it seems too coincidental that these people (and others) provided their email contacts to LinkedIn at exactly the same time. One good takeaway is, despite it taking me 5 more years to learn my lesson, and the really hard way :-(, I'm now using KeePass and creating difficult, unique passwords for each site, and using git to sync across computers. That helps.