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>My biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are alr
by ben1040 13y ago
>My biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are already using LinkedIn was the intention but they invited anyone who had ever mailed me!
I sold a guy a couch on Craigslist in 2005 or 2006, and he must've uploaded his Gmail contacts to LinkedIn not too long afterward. I only know this because for the last six years or so, the "People You May Know" feature on LinkedIn has kept trying to get me to add him as an e-friend.
- mikescoffield 13y agoThis has always interested me. I vaguely recall hearing somewhere that Gmail sells contact info to LinkedIn? Can anyone confirm or invalidate this? I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.
- ben1040 13y agoI haven't heard that. I just assume that there are enough people out there that I've conversed with that have uploaded their own contact list to LinkedIn to find connections. Gmail has/had that behavior where anyone you email ends up getting created as a contact, and in the early days it seemed a lot more aggressive as to when it would auto-add someone to the list. So there are a lot of people who have spurious entries in their contact lists. I know it wasn't worth the time to me to clean the list, up until I bought an Android phone in 2010. So I had six years worth of auto-added contacts, going back to when I first got a gmail invite.