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LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

334 points by interactually 13y ago

TallGuyShort 13y ago
I've had the same experience. Register on LinkedIn, log in, "Would you like to connect with <screwed up relationship from years ago>?" We hadn't spoken in years or connected on any other site, I could only come up with one thing: she emailed me once. I bet she gave LinkedIn her email credentials to find connections. I hate that feature.
- dbla 13y ago
  I always had the same hypothesis as to how they were able to find those random connections. Which is why I refuse to give any social network access to my email contact list. For my own privacy and for my contacts privacy.
  - TallGuyShort 13y ago
    Yeah this really highlighted to me the inherent danger of social computing - I can be as private as I want, but I'm only as private as my real life friends are about me. I don't have to upload my email contacts for third parties to find out all sorts of interesting things about who I talk to.
    - coldpie 13y ago
      I actually avoid being in photos at parties and events these days thanks to this risk. Facial recognition creeps me the hell out, and no one can seem to stop putting squares and names around everyone's faces when they upload photos (what are you gaining by this????). Gonna be fun times when everyone has Google Glass and that data leaks or, more likely, continues to be volunteered by others without my consent.
      - btb 13y ago
        Yup. Read an article the other day that police cars in some US cities drives around continously scanning license plates with topmounted cameras. Given Moore's law, I suppose they will sooner or later have the computanional power to be able to expand that to realtime facial scanning too.
- atechnerd 13y ago
  I was thinking the exact same thing. It's funny that he wrote that entire post and never raised the possibility of OTHER people sharing their contacts with LinkedIn, and that may explain at least some of the "people you may know."
  - interactually 13y ago
    You're right, I hadn't thought about that. The first person that commented on the blog pointed it out. You're also right, however, that it only explains some of the suggestions they made. It still doesn't explain some of the others, and they still don't make any mention of that in their Help page explaining where they get the data from.
- saraid216 13y ago
  What confuses me is that I've had the correct contacts show up in Facebook for an email address no one else should know about.
  - jtbigwoo 13y ago
    It's probably just name, location, and interest matching. Especially if you have a fairly uncommon name.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      It's using a different name; I don't think I have a location set; and the only similar interest would be League of Legends, since I created the account initially just to get the free promo. The only thing I can think of is that it's matching IP addresses and concluding my two accounts are the same account.
      - sp332 13y ago
        Even when you log out of Facebook, it keeps some cookies around.It could be more than just IP address.
        saraid216 13y ago
        Different browser, too. :P On the other hand, I'm not sure how well separated I kept those, so it could have been cookies linking the accounts. (I did this way back in 2010, so my memory is fuzzy.)
      - jtbigwoo 13y ago
        Now that's fascinating. Matching an IP address is a different thing than using information that a user has shared explicitly.
dmbass 13y ago
I always assumed the suggestions were from other people importing their Twitters and email contacts. So if person A emails me and then imports their emails, Linkedin can suggest to both of us that we might know each other, increasing the chance of creating a connection (and creepy-ness factor for me).
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Twitter is more interesting in this case because it allows unilateral following. So even if you broke it off with a now ex-girlfriend if they were still (or even only now) following you on Twitter that graph might make indicate the awareness.
- anon987 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure that's the case. I got suggestions for 2 people I played WoW with and the only ways we communicated were in-game chat, voice chat, and we had a single e-mail chain where we (the officers) talked about....something, I forget what. I'm guessing one of them imported their mail contacts because I doubt LinkedIn has visibility into Blizzard's social network or private voice chat servers. I think the creepy part about LinkedIn is you can actually see who views who. If Facebook did that it would be very embarrassing for a lot of people.
  - yen223 13y ago
    "I think the creepy part about LinkedIn is you can actually see who views who." Is it any creepier than being able to stalk some stranger's Facebook profile anonymously?
- mhurron 13y ago
  The automatic links are one of the reasons I don't use LinkedIn. I have worked at places with people that I do not under any circumstances want to be associated with. I work in a completely different city now and will be moving to another town, which will make as clean a break from them as possible. A social network continuing to track that is a significant issue.
josh2600 13y ago
I don't know, LinkedIn seems a lot less creepy than Facebook. I mean some of the ads I get hit with would make many folks blush.
- illuminate 13y ago
  "some of the ads I get hit with would make many folks blush" I'm guessing the "likes" you have that cause the targeted ads to hone in on you would also make many folks blush. At least, before I shut mine down some months ago, I had plenty of interesting likes but I never had any ads that didn't match my content.
  - josh2600 13y ago
    I appreciate your insinuation about my "likes". I don't really have anything "liked" on my Facebook but please, go ahead and tell me about how my personal preferences are affecting my online experience. I'm happy that your anecdotal experience was different from mine, but your empirical evidence does not undermine mine. Good day sir.
    - illuminate 13y ago
      Facebook tends to base these ads around collected data and demographics, the targeting is not generally random. Perhaps other sites you've browsed that share data with Facebook's advertising network? I suppose there's also the possibility of malware replacing FB's ads with their own.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
No creepier than other social networking sites. I find it interesting that it has automated what some folks have done on their own for years. There was a woman at Netapp who managed these sorts of potential and known relationships in her head about the folks working at a couple of big Netapp customers. I guess what I find amusing is that it is was my experience when introducing myself to someone new at a social event and saying "I work at <company>" or "Yeah, I grew up in Las Vegas" or something along those lines I would often get "Really, I knew this person <name> who worked/lived there, did you know them?" as social banter. It didn't creep me out then either, but I'm sure that for some folks it does.
geetee 13y ago
LinkedIn recently suggested my neighbor from 1995. I didn't even have Internet access, let alone an email address back then. I haven't had any contact with this person since.
- hollerith 13y ago
  My guess is the neighbor put your name in LinkedIn's search box.
  - geetee 13y ago
    Most likely. I'm not sure if that makes him or LinkedIn creepier.
    - integraton 13y ago
      Why would it be creepy for someone using a social networking site to search for people they've met over the years? Also, how much of the perceived "creepiness" of someone searching for someone on LinkedIn just a variation of this: http://thedoghousediaries.com/1042 http://thedoghousediaries.com/1042 ?
  - smutticus 13y ago
    That or they have information on where you and your neighbor once lived. I have signed up for a couple of online brokerage accounts where they ask me questions about where I or my family have lived in the past. I got questions like; "At which of these 5 addresses has $BROTHER ever lived before?" And one of them was correct.
    - chloraphil 13y ago
      I've had similar questions when opening online accounts before, I believe that information comes from your credit report.
Caerus 13y ago
Facebook does the same thing and it's just as creepy. I closed my "real" account around 2011. A few months back I created a new blank account because I needed access to a couple organization's pages. The only information on that account is my name (a fairly common one) and an email address which is different from the one on my original account. It's possible they have some geographic info linking the two accounts as I closed and opened them from the same city. 90% of the "people you may know" are correct and from dramatically different social groups. Some how it's picked out a girl I did a family stay with in Germany in '04, a fourth cousin I'm only vaguely aware of, current friends from several groups, and high school friends I haven't talked to in 10 years.
- vidarh 13y ago
  I set up a test Facebook account while doing a Facebook app that uses an e-mail address that has never been used for anything else. Yet it keeps suggesting people I actually know. The second account also does not have my full name (if it had my full name it'd be less weird, as my name to my knowledge is globally unique - there's only a few hundred people with my last name worldwide) The account has not been used for anything related to me. I've never searched for anyone from it. Never given my e-mail address there... The only thing connecting the two is that the "fake" e-mail address is a "real-user-part+something@gmail.com" address, and that I've logged in to them from the same machine. It took less than a day before that account started getting friend requests from people I know (clearly the "TEST" instead of my surname did nothing to dissuade them)
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    > and that I've logged in to them from the same machine Wouldn't that be a dead giveaway?
    - teraflop 13y ago
      If you can't log into Facebook from a public/shared computer without them disclosing your relationships to everyone else who uses that computer, they should make that very very clear.
joelandren 13y ago
Yes, I also noted the creepiness of "viewers of the profile also viewed." https://twitter.com/joelandren/status/251417778643406848 https://twitter.com/joelandren/status/251417778643406848 If I were a woman, I would be turned off to see something like this.
- vidarh 13y ago
  Yeah, I've noticed that quite often. If you happen onto the profile of pretty much any woman that's above average attractive (and quite a few that aren't) you get that. I don't think the same is case for the men, though perhaps I'm just blind to what women finds attractive in men...
  - joezydeco 13y ago
    I used to get really upset at the large number of local recruiting firms that used a revolving door of attractive women fresh out of college to work as external recruiters. They were energetic, friendly, and it's a lot harder to say no to a sales pitch when they're at your office door and smiling. Now I can see that there's a secondary use for an attractive LinkedIn profile picture as well. That might have a lot more leverage than cold-calling offices these days.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I'm not sure how much one should read into that. I mean, ok, there are probably some guys (and some women, as far as that goes) who click on profiles solely due to the attractiveness of the picture. BUT... there are other reasonable reasons to explain a picture like shown above. For example, note that all of the people listed appear to work in related domains (marketing, event management of some sort). Given the nature of linkedin (business networking, with a heavy emphasis on recruiting) it makes sense that somebody looking to, say, poach an event planner or marketing person, would look at those profiles. And, from what I've seen, those are a couple of domains where women are heavily represented. Recruiting is another one. Anyway, just as a little anecdotal test, I just logged into LinkedIn and looked at two profiles, both attractive women, where one is a recruiter and the other is a developer. In the recruiter case, every single entry in the "people also viewed" list was female (and also a recruiter), in the case of the developer they were almost completely male (with two exceptions) and are either developers or work for the same company. I don't know... maybe this is indicative of something that should be considered "creepy" but I have my doubts.
rcoh 13y ago
For a while, Linked in was present a password input box that looked like "You failed to login, try again" at a glance, but in reality it was asking for your email address and password. From that point, they could read your email and extract all your contacts.
jere 13y ago
Here are some things I find more creepy about LinkedIn: -It tells people when I view their profile. So now I never view people's profiles because I don't want to look like a stalker. Imagine if Facebook worked this way. -An andecdote, but maybe you've experienced it: a guy I worked with about 3 years ago (and only for 2 weeks) has "endorsed" me several times recently. I don't know if this is some kind of quid pro quo, but it makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
- nsoun 13y ago
  You can disable the option in your profile settings to not show when you've viewed someones contact info, however, this means you'll no longer know who the people are the view your profile.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    AKA copying OKCupid
- alex_c 13y ago
  In fact, Facebook does quite the opposite - there's always been demand for "see who looked at your profile" apps on Facebook, and Facebook has always gone out of their way to squash them. It's something they most certainly don't want to happen on their platform, with good reason.
  - WilliamSt 13y ago
    You can bet Facebook is storing that data though. And who knows what the future holds, perhaps Facebook will be forced to sell that data to its users in order to increase revenue and make stock holders content?
    - slig 13y ago
      Yes, they are. They have an ranked array of your top contacted/stalked friends and they use it to speed up the topbar search. In fact, there is an bookmarklet that shows the list: http://thekeesh.com/2013/03/updated-facebook-friends-ranking-bookmarklet-to-work-with-graph-search/ http://thekeesh.com/2013/03/updated-facebook-friends-ranking...
speeder 13y ago
I just did a test and opened LinkedIn and took a look at the suggested people. They included: Several people with the same name as I (expected, not really creepy). But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now. Also I doubt they remember me to search me, I am not much remarkable. People that I met at school and church 6, 7 years ago, and that again, I never exchanged electronic messages with them. Yes, LinkedIn is very, very, very creepy.
- vph 13y ago
  I am curious why this is supposedly creepy. I think the main premise of a social network is that you reach out or get reached out to people who might know you or you might know. Now, you have the option of not reaching out to those people, and I think it is fair game that the social network assumes that other members might reach out to you, a member of the network. If you do not like that aspect of the social network, do not join it.
  - k3n 13y ago
    Educated guesses are one thing; exact "guesses" are quite another, and one has to wonder where the 'guessing' is pulling its data. Would it creep you out if I guess which month you were born in? Probably not. Would it creep you out if I guessed your exact birthday, including month/day/year? Hell yeah it would. It has nothing to do with whether or not one wants to be social, and everything to do with random, axe-murderer creepiness. Imagine if I walked up to you at a party and rattled off names of 5 random people from different aspects of your life; would that not freak you out? "Oh, you don't know me, but I know you ;)". That's virtually the same thing that is happening here.
- Evgeny 13y ago
  But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now. Well, if your instructor kept emails of all students in his personal address book, and he happened to share it with LinkedIn, then LinkedIn may deduce that each person on the list may be somehow connected to each other.
tomc1985 13y ago
The contact-address-book-thing works both ways, I believe. If YOU let them access your contacts, or if anyone who's contact book you are in lets LinkedIn access their contacts, they will pop up on "People You May Know"
joezydeco 13y ago
I think we all don't want to admit that we look up ex-girlfriends, neighbors, college roommates, etc. when we're on these social networks and we're bored (or lonely). I searched for an ex once on LinkedIn and found nothing...until a year later when she finally signed on and there she was in my "you might know" suggestion list.
base698 13y ago
I routinely get suggested to connect with people I've never even emailed or who used email account I closed a decade ago. It's reasons like this I wish someone would do a Public/Private key based p2p social network. Essentially you digitally sign a key that you know someone and that's how you derive connections. Seems like you could implement browsable profiles as well.
- freshhawk 13y ago
  Its a great idea, but I think everyone who has had it is stopped when they look at just how unwilling people are to exchange keys (or understand them) and how unwilling browser companies are to put effort into interfaces for managing keys (both of these obviously feed into each other).
  - finnw 13y ago
    The type of user who uses public keys usually knows better than to use server-side key management on a social networking site (however pretty the interface may be.)
    - freshhawk 13y ago
      Oh definitely, that's why I highlighted the lack of innovation in browsers for handling keys and encryption/decryption. This all needs to happen locally (not the trendy thing these days) and the current tools aren't at the level where that's going to happen at a large scale. There would still be the key-exchange problem (I can't imagine a system that would make it easy for non-technical people to exchange keys out of band, even if you could explain why that was necessary and what it means), but with good browser tools I bet the number of zero-knowledge type sites/p2p networks would explode.
      - base698 13y ago
        I think if you take away the need to it to be really truly secure it's workable. Social profiles aren't nuclear secrets, they are just posts about topics and pictures. I think if you embed the private key with a symmetric key password that would be good enough. I do wonder why that hasn't been done especially in the era of native mobile apps.
maresca 13y ago
I'm usually pretty careful about picking technologies and websites to use. I've steered clear of linkedin and as time goes on, I'm pretty happy with that decision.
jtbigwoo 13y ago
There's a more benign answer to the creepy connection suggestions. LOTS of people import their email address books into linkedin. It's not a stretch to think that his girlfriend's mother (or some other relative) imported her address book that contained the names of both the OP and the girlfriend's stepfather. As far as the creepier name mismatches go, my oldest email address list has tons of maiden names and unused/defunct email addresses. It's likely that some high school friend of the OP uploaded an old address book and LinkedIn's algorithm made a best effort match on some of the rarer names even if the email addresses don't match. I mean, how many Lucy Hatsbaughs do you think there are on linked in? Two? LinkedIn may as well gamble on odds like that.
- edwardunknown 13y ago
  I didn't import anything to LinkedIn. One person showed up on mine who could only have come from either my Twitter account or G+ account, both of which have been deleted. Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.
  - Aloisius 13y ago
    So you and the person it suggested to you don't know anyone in common that might have uploaded their address book?
    - edwardunknown 13y ago
      I guess that's possible, but unlikely. I'm looking at it now, she's still there and so is a girl I had a crush on in junior high. This is fascinating but extremely disturbing, I'm deleting this thing asap. I figure I must have googled her and found her LinkedIn page while signed in, it could have been years ago. In fact that's got to be the explanation for both of them unless they did something extremely unethical with the email address I gave them.
  - jtbigwoo 13y ago
    I'm saying that I think the other person may have uploaded their contacts and then chosen not to send you a friend request or there's someone follows both you and the other person on twitter. In order to build long lists of suggestions, LinkedIn probably has to make some pretty big leaps of logic. But, other posters have done some anonymous experiments that suggest there's something else going on, perhaps with cookies from other sites or IP addresses. I'm not sure how we'd figure it out, though. >> Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever. I'm not judging, I promise. :)
smaili 13y ago
As a hacker, I consider seeing Error establishing a database connection as more creepy :)
- interactually 13y ago
  haha good point. It's fixed now.
Zigurd 13y ago
I see LinkedIn as something akin to going to networking events. They really really want you to network, and they make some reasonable assumptions about your inhibitions. That's what their paying customers are there for.
gdltec 13y ago
Wow, it looks like interactually's site has been hacked
- jdolitsky 13y ago
  Yea, I would do something, I was redirected to the wordpress installation screen..
  - interactually 13y ago
    Lesson of the day: Don't go to lunch after posting an article like this. I got it handled as soon as I got back!
    - jdolitsky 13y ago
      lol
darxius 13y ago
Looks like his site was taken down or something. Its redirecting to the wordpress setup page.
- interactually 13y ago
  Back up now, server couldn't handle all the database requests.
mariusmg 13y ago
To me LinkedIn is basically a bunch of people circle jerking each other. Professionally.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  To me LinkedIn is basically a bunch of people circle jerking each other. Professionally. Endorsed: Product Knowledge.
- drharris 13y ago
  No, to be fair, it's also a bunch of people filling out profile information and then wondering what the heck to even do with it.
some1else 13y ago
The site is down for me. Here is the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1436&bih=806&sclient=psy-ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&gs_l=serp.3...12288.12981.1.13574.6.6.0.0.0.0.101.436.4j1.5.0...0.1...1c.1.12.psy-ab.bV51ytimoPc&pbx=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1436&bi... Update: Creepy. But I think most of this data can be lifted from other users who imported contacts from GMail. I think they must be matching only by name, because people could have been in touch with different mail addresses (at a previous employer, for instance).
- interactually 13y ago
  Sorry about that, I didn't expect the response the article got, should be resolved now. And thanks for posting the cached version!
jack-r-abbit 13y ago
The OP site is down so I don't know what they are citing as "creepy"... but I never considered LinkedIn to be a social network. It has always just been a professional network. It is my always on, mostly up to date resume. It has the who/what/where/when of my employment history. I have only accepted connections from people that I have worked with (and even then only those I actually worked with... not just anyone that worked at the same company but does not actually know me in some way) or friends that are in similar fields (and the rare cases of recruiters I've dealt with regarding employment). It actually bothers me that people use it to post twitter/facebook style status updates. LinkedIn is the last place I would think to read about someone's breakfast choice... but I've seen those updates before.
- interactually 13y ago
  Sorry about the crash, its back up now!
mikeevans 13y ago
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&aq=f&oq=cache%3Awww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58j60.2709j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.i...
Lewton 13y ago
I don't have a linkedin account. Should I? Does it provide value I can't find elsewhere?
- TallGuyShort 13y ago
  I think it's the best / most ubiquitous way to always have your up-to-date resume available, and to keep in touch with industry contacts.
  - jaredmcateer 13y ago
    I like the hard copies Careers 2.0 prints out better but the Industry contacts on LinkedIn can't be beat.
- jaredmcateer 13y ago
  I get far more quality recruiters contacting me that I ever have from sites like Monster, most of the ones on LinkedIn know the difference between Java and JavaScript and they don't take the one line in my history 5 years ago that said I helped build a printer script in C# that was used by a clients SAP system to mean I have 15 years SAP experience.
- reinhardt 13y ago
  The value I get from it is mostly gathering intelligence about companies (e.g. size, new hires/leaves, key people in similar roles, etc), much less about actual "socializing". I very rarely initiate a connection, most of my (double digit only) contacts are by accepting invitations.
- wtracy 13y ago
  I find it to be a good way for recruiters to find me. That may or may not be something that you want.
oddshocks 13y ago
Redirected to your install.php file at this URL: http://www.interactually.com/linkedin-creepiest-social-network/wp-admin/install.php http://www.interactually.com/linkedin-creepiest-social-netwo...
edgely 13y ago
Site's down.
- interactually 13y ago
  Back up now, sorry about that!
michaelochurch 13y ago
Y'all know that I worked for Google. On this topic, I can only say good things about the place. When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard. Many of these "social" innovations that are popping up on the market place were rejected out-of-hand at Google because it holds itself to an extremely high ethical standard regarding user data, as it actually respects them. I was shocked, for example, when I learned that a certain social network gives universal profile access to employees as a perk. That would not happen at Google. If you looked at your high-school ex-girlfriend's email, you'd be fired immediately (and deserve it). Social is creepy, because it's all about being defined by other people, which is ridiculous and horrible. What, so do I suck at Programming Languages because I haven't trolled my 25 closest acquaintances for endorsements? Am I really going to become more credible in Machine Learning if I get 15 strangers to "endorse" me? The major conflict in "Social" is what I call "Document vs. Improve" (or: Exploit vs. Explore). A social app can expand the web of social connections and make it more efficient, but (a) that's really hard, and (b) there isn't a lot of short-term money in it. Or it can document social relationships that already exist, and make a shit-ton of money off the data. That's easy, but it doesn't actually make anyone's life better. Guess which one the mainstream social players favor? What I find depressing about LinkedIn is how much it has play-by-play replicated the old, broken way of doing things. Resumes. Titles and dates of employment. Recommendations. Recruiter spam. It feels like the Wayback Machine took us to 1995.
- codegeek 13y ago
  "broken way of doing things. Resumes. Titles and dates of employment. Recommendations. Recruiter spam" How would you do it differently ? Genuinely interested in your opinion on this.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    Great question, and it'd take me a long time to answer. My first thought about resumes is that they serve two purposes, one legitimate and one not: (a) social status grading, which is easy for douchebags to game and for extortionists ("do <X> or I'll fire you and give you a bad reference") to abuse. (b) a list of "ask me about <X>" topics where X ranges over areas of professional expertise and interests, so they can probe you during the interview as to what you actually know. I'd focus on (b) while throwing (a) to the wind. One thought I had is an "allocate 20 points" system. You don't actually have to prove anything because resumes suck at that, but if you put "Machine Learning: 7" that shows that you view yourself as being "35%" Machine Learning and are fairly comfortable discussing it on an interview. This leads to the concept of a scarce graph, which is weighted but also imposes granularity (e.g. 20-point limit with 1-point minimum units) to prevent sprawl, and forces people to prioritize. Running graph algorithms against scarce graphs, with data pertaining to peoples' desires for connection (new jobs, new candidates) could be interesting. So there's that. You get as much legitimate information out of a 20-point allocation of interests and experience as you would out of a resume or a job posting. What you don't get is the social status bullshit (dates and titles). Ok, onto fixing the labor market in general, I think the best solution I can come up with is to build this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employment-with-consulting-call-options/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employ... That's Part I. Part II comes from the fact that, if Part I is build, people are going to want to get better, fast, at marketing themselves so their call options trade at a higher rate. That leads naturally into career coaching (a better model than traditional recruiting) but also into objective evaluation of, for example, source code quality. Now we can actually verify that, yes, John is a top-notch programmer and his $200/hr-struck call options actually aren't out of the money. Part III would be to use all the professional development data thus gathered and start scoring employers based on how much value they add to peoples' careers. How fast does a typical person grow, as a programmer, after 2 years at Google? What does it do for that person's employment potential 10 years down the road? Those would be great things to know.
joethrow 13y ago
On a throw away account. Several people have hit upon the major method LinkedIn uses which is that someone you know who has your name/email/... (or likely many someones) uploaded an address book to LinkedIn. LinkedIn then infers that because that person knows you, that you may know the other people they know (which is often true). They then combine that when a bunch of far more complicated inferences to generate the list. The goal of course is to provide suggestions to someone who just signed up. Sadly, the reason it feels creepy is because it seems like voodoo. They could do a better job explaining how it worked, but a lot of the bigger inferences are secret sauce.
onemorepassword 13y ago
It's not the creepiness that's relevant here. That's rather subjective, and as others have pointed out, all social networks do the same. What's most relevant here is that it's downright illegal in most Western countries LinkedIn e.a. operate in. Both collecting this information and sharing it without explicit (as in: not just default checked boxes) informed (as in: information about why, what and shared with whom) consent is not just unethical, it's a violation of most known privacy laws. The widespread practice of blatantly unethical business practices in our industry by both high profile companies and small start-ups alike is something we as professionals should take more seriously. If we don't, it doesn't only harm the image of our industry, but we'll be faced with ever more regulatory hurdles. The infamous EU cookie law is just the beginning if we don't act to clean up our own industry. Every second web company seems to have a business model that directly or indirectly generates revenue through stalking people on a massive scale. This cannot possible be sustainable without a huge backlash.
blhack 13y ago
I finally joined linkedin about a week ago, and it just feels...scammy. It's interesting to me (or frightening) that some of the smartest people I know have the fewest endorsements. People I know doing [1]actual real work on things like "microcontrollers" have...3-4 endorsements with them, but people who I know have only maybe installed Linux, have 20 or so endorsements for "linux". There are people I know who are post-graduate level experts on certain fields, and those fields are either not listed at all, or they have maybe 1 or 2 endorsements for it. Stupid. I'll keep just linking people to my github, and showing them projects I've built. [1]: Actual real work as in: writing libraries that other people use. Contributing to the community in ways that effect the entire community.
- dgallagher 13y ago
  Speculating: Perhaps people who have lesser skills make up for it by networking, asking others to endorse them to fluff up their profile? Those with valuable skill sets might have little need for that, and can promote themselves more optimally. Example: "So-and-So endorses me for Programming" vs. "github.com/myrepo/"
- thetrb 13y ago
  The number of endorsements is really just a matter of the number of connections and a persons activity on Linkedin (e.g. if a person endorses many others, then it's likely they will also be endorsed by them).
- wtetzner 13y ago
  The endorsements on LinkedIn are useless. LinkedIn suggests things like "Endorse [So and So] for [some thing]," and people just click the "endorse" button. People that know nothing about technology have endorsed me for skills I don't have.
  - iffyuva 13y ago
    That endorsements looks more or less like a poll. People with whom I have barely worked also endorsed me! Very creepy!
tloudon 13y ago
probably worth pointing out that LI doesn't have ads and makes its money from subscribers, most of whom i'm guessing are sales/recruiting. from a pure-business-no-ethics perspective, why would you care what anyone else thought? w/ that point of view: every connection or link, however creepy, makes the system as whole more valuable to subscribers. personally, the feature doesn't have enough churn, so i always see the same 5 faces, 99% of the time it's background...otherwise it would probably creep me out slash annoy more.
localhost3000 13y ago
funny this should come up today. the girl i am currently dating happens to be both attractive and asian. i was on her linkedin yesterday and noticed that the "people also viewed" widget was 100% other young, good-looking asian women. so, add race as a vector to the linkedin creep graph...
- interactually 13y ago
  I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that. I was admittedly hesitant to add that part to the story.
yid 13y ago
yid 13y ago
bifrost 13y ago
Eh, LinkedIn says that there are other people that work for my company that I might know. The only problem is, I'm an officer of my company, I know everyone who works there and they're all on my Linkedin. The people its suggesting, work for a similarly named company, about 1000 miles away... Score 1 for accuracy...
datums 13y ago
How was Doug connected ? Doug while only communicating with you via email imported his contacts. His contacts include you. There's the connection. Works similarly on FB. When that business associate imports contacts aka connections, they find you on the other side :) It's really that simple
JoeKM 13y ago
If you're a programmer I see no reason to have a LinkedIn profile. GitHub is better for résumé and networking.
ttrreeww 13y ago
As long as LinkedIn continues to get me high paying jobs, it is all good.
rjempson 13y ago
I don't like LinkedIn for similar reasons but I somehow feel I will offend people if I drop out, and I have had some decent leads from it over the years. The import contacts feature is particularly nefarious, it says "import" but it actually keeps checking down the track (or at least it used to work like that).
rooker 13y ago
I did the "attractive women" thing (took a hit for the team, for science) and that was absolutely true. The odd thing was, the first random girl I clicked on was this girl I kinda had a crush on in college (all my "People you may know" recommendations were from college, even as I'm three years out) who happened to be Asian. Then...all of the "Also Viewed" were fairly attractive, well-groomed Asian women. Isn't that interesting? I thought at the very least it would break me out of race, but apparently they're their own class. The other thing I'll say is perhaps this author is tapped out of "People you may know" and LinkedIn is simply guessing . Mine looks fairly reasonable, random, and not like they were digging particularly deep.
kashrr 13y ago
I was just feeling creeped out going to my linkedin page and seeing one of my wife's relatives in the recommendation and wondering how the hell? Then i come and see this in hacker news! Talk about timing. I think linkedin creeps me out a little more than usual because, with facebook for example i almost expect them to pull off stuff like this. And since linkedin is a professional network, maybe i expected them to be more professional :)
pootch 13y ago
Not only is linked in creepy...it sucks. Hopefully Yahoo will buy them and shut them down and then we can ignore it forever like everything else Yahoo does.
lololomg 13y ago
If LinkedIn would just stop spamming me I'd be sooo happy. I don't even know where they got my email address!
laurent123456 13y ago
I also don't like how they recently changed the invitation email titles to "XXX, good to see you on LinkedIn", as it makes it look like it's a personal message, when it's not.
neduma 13y ago
Just deleted my account today.
qompiler 13y ago
LinkedIn leaks privacy information through their "also viewed" section. Applied to a new job and started working there, after a few months I decided to look up my managers LinkedIn profile, only to notice that on his page the "also viewed" section showed employees from my older company and family. So yeah, so now I know he was trying to figure out more about me through LinkedIn.
- harryf 13y ago
  I'm not sure this is a bad thing. In your example isn't a good thing to know your new boss did this? Social networks encourage creepy behavior amongst their users. LinkedIn lets you know who viewed your profile while Facebook doesn't. Personally I'd rather know.
  - qompiler 13y ago
    Not a bad thing for me no.. this time! I don't think anyone is giving explicit permission to let the world know they have been snooping around other people's profiles. Although this information is not directly published it leaks through their "features".

334 points by interactually 13y ago

I've had the same experience. Register on LinkedIn, log in, "Would you like to connect with <screwed up relationship from years ago>?" We hadn't spoken in years or connected on any other site, I could only come up with one thing: she emailed me once. I bet she gave LinkedIn her email credentials to find connections. I hate that feature.

dbla 13y ago
I always had the same hypothesis as to how they were able to find those random connections. Which is why I refuse to give any social network access to my email contact list. For my own privacy and for my contacts privacy.
- TallGuyShort 13y ago
  Yeah this really highlighted to me the inherent danger of social computing - I can be as private as I want, but I'm only as private as my real life friends are about me. I don't have to upload my email contacts for third parties to find out all sorts of interesting things about who I talk to.
  - coldpie 13y ago
    I actually avoid being in photos at parties and events these days thanks to this risk. Facial recognition creeps me the hell out, and no one can seem to stop putting squares and names around everyone's faces when they upload photos (what are you gaining by this????). Gonna be fun times when everyone has Google Glass and that data leaks or, more likely, continues to be volunteered by others without my consent.
    - btb 13y ago
      Yup. Read an article the other day that police cars in some US cities drives around continously scanning license plates with topmounted cameras. Given Moore's law, I suppose they will sooner or later have the computanional power to be able to expand that to realtime facial scanning too.
atechnerd 13y ago
I was thinking the exact same thing. It's funny that he wrote that entire post and never raised the possibility of OTHER people sharing their contacts with LinkedIn, and that may explain at least some of the "people you may know."
- interactually 13y ago
  You're right, I hadn't thought about that. The first person that commented on the blog pointed it out. You're also right, however, that it only explains some of the suggestions they made. It still doesn't explain some of the others, and they still don't make any mention of that in their Help page explaining where they get the data from.
saraid216 13y ago
What confuses me is that I've had the correct contacts show up in Facebook for an email address no one else should know about.
- jtbigwoo 13y ago
  It's probably just name, location, and interest matching. Especially if you have a fairly uncommon name.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    It's using a different name; I don't think I have a location set; and the only similar interest would be League of Legends, since I created the account initially just to get the free promo. The only thing I can think of is that it's matching IP addresses and concluding my two accounts are the same account.
    - sp332 13y ago
      Even when you log out of Facebook, it keeps some cookies around.It could be more than just IP address.
      - saraid216 13y ago
        Different browser, too. :P On the other hand, I'm not sure how well separated I kept those, so it could have been cookies linking the accounts. (I did this way back in 2010, so my memory is fuzzy.)
    - jtbigwoo 13y ago
      Now that's fascinating. Matching an IP address is a different thing than using information that a user has shared explicitly.

dmbass 13y ago

I always assumed the suggestions were from other people importing their Twitters and email contacts. So if person A emails me and then imports their emails, Linkedin can suggest to both of us that we might know each other, increasing the chance of creating a connection (and creepy-ness factor for me).

ChuckMcM 13y ago
Twitter is more interesting in this case because it allows unilateral following. So even if you broke it off with a now ex-girlfriend if they were still (or even only now) following you on Twitter that graph might make indicate the awareness.
anon987 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that's the case. I got suggestions for 2 people I played WoW with and the only ways we communicated were in-game chat, voice chat, and we had a single e-mail chain where we (the officers) talked about....something, I forget what. I'm guessing one of them imported their mail contacts because I doubt LinkedIn has visibility into Blizzard's social network or private voice chat servers. I think the creepy part about LinkedIn is you can actually see who views who. If Facebook did that it would be very embarrassing for a lot of people.
- yen223 13y ago
  "I think the creepy part about LinkedIn is you can actually see who views who." Is it any creepier than being able to stalk some stranger's Facebook profile anonymously?
mhurron 13y ago
The automatic links are one of the reasons I don't use LinkedIn. I have worked at places with people that I do not under any circumstances want to be associated with. I work in a completely different city now and will be moving to another town, which will make as clean a break from them as possible. A social network continuing to track that is a significant issue.

josh2600 13y ago

I don't know, LinkedIn seems a lot less creepy than Facebook. I mean some of the ads I get hit with would make many folks blush.

illuminate 13y ago
"some of the ads I get hit with would make many folks blush" I'm guessing the "likes" you have that cause the targeted ads to hone in on you would also make many folks blush. At least, before I shut mine down some months ago, I had plenty of interesting likes but I never had any ads that didn't match my content.
- josh2600 13y ago
  I appreciate your insinuation about my "likes". I don't really have anything "liked" on my Facebook but please, go ahead and tell me about how my personal preferences are affecting my online experience. I'm happy that your anecdotal experience was different from mine, but your empirical evidence does not undermine mine. Good day sir.
  - illuminate 13y ago
    Facebook tends to base these ads around collected data and demographics, the targeting is not generally random. Perhaps other sites you've browsed that share data with Facebook's advertising network? I suppose there's also the possibility of malware replacing FB's ads with their own.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

No creepier than other social networking sites. I find it interesting that it has automated what some folks have done on their own for years. There was a woman at Netapp who managed these sorts of potential and known relationships in her head about the folks working at a couple of big Netapp customers. I guess what I find amusing is that it is was my experience when introducing myself to someone new at a social event and saying "I work at <company>" or "Yeah, I grew up in Las Vegas" or something along those lines I would often get "Really, I knew this person <name> who worked/lived there, did you know them?" as social banter. It didn't creep me out then either, but I'm sure that for some folks it does.

geetee 13y ago

LinkedIn recently suggested my neighbor from 1995. I didn't even have Internet access, let alone an email address back then. I haven't had any contact with this person since.

hollerith 13y ago
My guess is the neighbor put your name in LinkedIn's search box.
- geetee 13y ago
  Most likely. I'm not sure if that makes him or LinkedIn creepier.
  - integraton 13y ago
    Why would it be creepy for someone using a social networking site to search for people they've met over the years? Also, how much of the perceived "creepiness" of someone searching for someone on LinkedIn just a variation of this: http://thedoghousediaries.com/1042 http://thedoghousediaries.com/1042 ?
- smutticus 13y ago
  That or they have information on where you and your neighbor once lived. I have signed up for a couple of online brokerage accounts where they ask me questions about where I or my family have lived in the past. I got questions like; "At which of these 5 addresses has $BROTHER ever lived before?" And one of them was correct.
  - chloraphil 13y ago
    I've had similar questions when opening online accounts before, I believe that information comes from your credit report.

Caerus 13y ago

Facebook does the same thing and it's just as creepy. I closed my "real" account around 2011. A few months back I created a new blank account because I needed access to a couple organization's pages. The only information on that account is my name (a fairly common one) and an email address which is different from the one on my original account. It's possible they have some geographic info linking the two accounts as I closed and opened them from the same city. 90% of the "people you may know" are correct and from dramatically different social groups. Some how it's picked out a girl I did a family stay with in Germany in '04, a fourth cousin I'm only vaguely aware of, current friends from several groups, and high school friends I haven't talked to in 10 years.

vidarh 13y ago
I set up a test Facebook account while doing a Facebook app that uses an e-mail address that has never been used for anything else. Yet it keeps suggesting people I actually know. The second account also does not have my full name (if it had my full name it'd be less weird, as my name to my knowledge is globally unique - there's only a few hundred people with my last name worldwide) The account has not been used for anything related to me. I've never searched for anyone from it. Never given my e-mail address there... The only thing connecting the two is that the "fake" e-mail address is a "real-user-part+something@gmail.com" address, and that I've logged in to them from the same machine. It took less than a day before that account started getting friend requests from people I know (clearly the "TEST" instead of my surname did nothing to dissuade them)
- StavrosK 13y ago
  > and that I've logged in to them from the same machine Wouldn't that be a dead giveaway?
  - teraflop 13y ago
    If you can't log into Facebook from a public/shared computer without them disclosing your relationships to everyone else who uses that computer, they should make that very very clear.

joelandren 13y ago

Yes, I also noted the creepiness of "viewers of the profile also viewed." https://twitter.com/joelandren/status/251417778643406848 https://twitter.com/joelandren/status/251417778643406848 If I were a woman, I would be turned off to see something like this.

vidarh 13y ago
Yeah, I've noticed that quite often. If you happen onto the profile of pretty much any woman that's above average attractive (and quite a few that aren't) you get that. I don't think the same is case for the men, though perhaps I'm just blind to what women finds attractive in men...
- joezydeco 13y ago
  I used to get really upset at the large number of local recruiting firms that used a revolving door of attractive women fresh out of college to work as external recruiters. They were energetic, friendly, and it's a lot harder to say no to a sales pitch when they're at your office door and smiling. Now I can see that there's a secondary use for an attractive LinkedIn profile picture as well. That might have a lot more leverage than cold-calling offices these days.
mindcrime 13y ago
I'm not sure how much one should read into that. I mean, ok, there are probably some guys (and some women, as far as that goes) who click on profiles solely due to the attractiveness of the picture. BUT... there are other reasonable reasons to explain a picture like shown above. For example, note that all of the people listed appear to work in related domains (marketing, event management of some sort). Given the nature of linkedin (business networking, with a heavy emphasis on recruiting) it makes sense that somebody looking to, say, poach an event planner or marketing person, would look at those profiles. And, from what I've seen, those are a couple of domains where women are heavily represented. Recruiting is another one. Anyway, just as a little anecdotal test, I just logged into LinkedIn and looked at two profiles, both attractive women, where one is a recruiter and the other is a developer. In the recruiter case, every single entry in the "people also viewed" list was female (and also a recruiter), in the case of the developer they were almost completely male (with two exceptions) and are either developers or work for the same company. I don't know... maybe this is indicative of something that should be considered "creepy" but I have my doubts.

rcoh 13y ago

For a while, Linked in was present a password input box that looked like "You failed to login, try again" at a glance, but in reality it was asking for your email address and password. From that point, they could read your email and extract all your contacts.

jere 13y ago

Here are some things I find more creepy about LinkedIn: -It tells people when I view their profile. So now I never view people's profiles because I don't want to look like a stalker. Imagine if Facebook worked this way. -An andecdote, but maybe you've experienced it: a guy I worked with about 3 years ago (and only for 2 weeks) has "endorsed" me several times recently. I don't know if this is some kind of quid pro quo, but it makes me somewhat uncomfortable.

nsoun 13y ago
You can disable the option in your profile settings to not show when you've viewed someones contact info, however, this means you'll no longer know who the people are the view your profile.
- rhizome 13y ago
  AKA copying OKCupid
alex_c 13y ago
In fact, Facebook does quite the opposite - there's always been demand for "see who looked at your profile" apps on Facebook, and Facebook has always gone out of their way to squash them. It's something they most certainly don't want to happen on their platform, with good reason.
- WilliamSt 13y ago
  You can bet Facebook is storing that data though. And who knows what the future holds, perhaps Facebook will be forced to sell that data to its users in order to increase revenue and make stock holders content?
  - slig 13y ago
    Yes, they are. They have an ranked array of your top contacted/stalked friends and they use it to speed up the topbar search. In fact, there is an bookmarklet that shows the list: http://thekeesh.com/2013/03/updated-facebook-friends-ranking-bookmarklet-to-work-with-graph-search/ http://thekeesh.com/2013/03/updated-facebook-friends-ranking...

speeder 13y ago

I just did a test and opened LinkedIn and took a look at the suggested people. They included: Several people with the same name as I (expected, not really creepy). But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now. Also I doubt they remember me to search me, I am not much remarkable. People that I met at school and church 6, 7 years ago, and that again, I never exchanged electronic messages with them. Yes, LinkedIn is very, very, very creepy.

vph 13y ago
I am curious why this is supposedly creepy. I think the main premise of a social network is that you reach out or get reached out to people who might know you or you might know. Now, you have the option of not reaching out to those people, and I think it is fair game that the social network assumes that other members might reach out to you, a member of the network. If you do not like that aspect of the social network, do not join it.
- k3n 13y ago
  Educated guesses are one thing; exact "guesses" are quite another, and one has to wonder where the 'guessing' is pulling its data. Would it creep you out if I guess which month you were born in? Probably not. Would it creep you out if I guessed your exact birthday, including month/day/year? Hell yeah it would. It has nothing to do with whether or not one wants to be social, and everything to do with random, axe-murderer creepiness. Imagine if I walked up to you at a party and rattled off names of 5 random people from different aspects of your life; would that not freak you out? "Oh, you don't know me, but I know you ;)". That's virtually the same thing that is happening here.
Evgeny 13y ago
But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now. Well, if your instructor kept emails of all students in his personal address book, and he happened to share it with LinkedIn, then LinkedIn may deduce that each person on the list may be somehow connected to each other.

tomc1985 13y ago

The contact-address-book-thing works both ways, I believe. If YOU let them access your contacts, or if anyone who's contact book you are in lets LinkedIn access their contacts, they will pop up on "People You May Know"

joezydeco 13y ago

I think we all don't want to admit that we look up ex-girlfriends, neighbors, college roommates, etc. when we're on these social networks and we're bored (or lonely). I searched for an ex once on LinkedIn and found nothing...until a year later when she finally signed on and there she was in my "you might know" suggestion list.

base698 13y ago

I routinely get suggested to connect with people I've never even emailed or who used email account I closed a decade ago. It's reasons like this I wish someone would do a Public/Private key based p2p social network. Essentially you digitally sign a key that you know someone and that's how you derive connections. Seems like you could implement browsable profiles as well.

freshhawk 13y ago
Its a great idea, but I think everyone who has had it is stopped when they look at just how unwilling people are to exchange keys (or understand them) and how unwilling browser companies are to put effort into interfaces for managing keys (both of these obviously feed into each other).
- finnw 13y ago
  The type of user who uses public keys usually knows better than to use server-side key management on a social networking site (however pretty the interface may be.)
  - freshhawk 13y ago
    Oh definitely, that's why I highlighted the lack of innovation in browsers for handling keys and encryption/decryption. This all needs to happen locally (not the trendy thing these days) and the current tools aren't at the level where that's going to happen at a large scale. There would still be the key-exchange problem (I can't imagine a system that would make it easy for non-technical people to exchange keys out of band, even if you could explain why that was necessary and what it means), but with good browser tools I bet the number of zero-knowledge type sites/p2p networks would explode.
    - base698 13y ago
      I think if you take away the need to it to be really truly secure it's workable. Social profiles aren't nuclear secrets, they are just posts about topics and pictures. I think if you embed the private key with a symmetric key password that would be good enough. I do wonder why that hasn't been done especially in the era of native mobile apps.

maresca 13y ago

I'm usually pretty careful about picking technologies and websites to use. I've steered clear of linkedin and as time goes on, I'm pretty happy with that decision.

jtbigwoo 13y ago

There's a more benign answer to the creepy connection suggestions. LOTS of people import their email address books into linkedin. It's not a stretch to think that his girlfriend's mother (or some other relative) imported her address book that contained the names of both the OP and the girlfriend's stepfather. As far as the creepier name mismatches go, my oldest email address list has tons of maiden names and unused/defunct email addresses. It's likely that some high school friend of the OP uploaded an old address book and LinkedIn's algorithm made a best effort match on some of the rarer names even if the email addresses don't match. I mean, how many Lucy Hatsbaughs do you think there are on linked in? Two? LinkedIn may as well gamble on odds like that.

edwardunknown 13y ago
I didn't import anything to LinkedIn. One person showed up on mine who could only have come from either my Twitter account or G+ account, both of which have been deleted. Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.
- Aloisius 13y ago
  So you and the person it suggested to you don't know anyone in common that might have uploaded their address book?
  - edwardunknown 13y ago
    I guess that's possible, but unlikely. I'm looking at it now, she's still there and so is a girl I had a crush on in junior high. This is fascinating but extremely disturbing, I'm deleting this thing asap. I figure I must have googled her and found her LinkedIn page while signed in, it could have been years ago. In fact that's got to be the explanation for both of them unless they did something extremely unethical with the email address I gave them.
- jtbigwoo 13y ago
  I'm saying that I think the other person may have uploaded their contacts and then chosen not to send you a friend request or there's someone follows both you and the other person on twitter. In order to build long lists of suggestions, LinkedIn probably has to make some pretty big leaps of logic. But, other posters have done some anonymous experiments that suggest there's something else going on, perhaps with cookies from other sites or IP addresses. I'm not sure how we'd figure it out, though. >> Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever. I'm not judging, I promise. :)

smaili 13y ago

As a hacker, I consider seeing Error establishing a database connection as more creepy :)

interactually 13y ago
haha good point. It's fixed now.

Zigurd 13y ago

I see LinkedIn as something akin to going to networking events. They really really want you to network, and they make some reasonable assumptions about your inhibitions. That's what their paying customers are there for.

gdltec 13y ago

Wow, it looks like interactually's site has been hacked

jdolitsky 13y ago
Yea, I would do something, I was redirected to the wordpress installation screen..
- interactually 13y ago
  Lesson of the day: Don't go to lunch after posting an article like this. I got it handled as soon as I got back!
  - jdolitsky 13y ago
    lol

darxius 13y ago

Looks like his site was taken down or something. Its redirecting to the wordpress setup page.

interactually 13y ago
Back up now, server couldn't handle all the database requests.

mariusmg 13y ago

To me LinkedIn is basically a bunch of people circle jerking each other. Professionally.

michaelochurch 13y ago
To me LinkedIn is basically a bunch of people circle jerking each other. Professionally. Endorsed: Product Knowledge.
drharris 13y ago
No, to be fair, it's also a bunch of people filling out profile information and then wondering what the heck to even do with it.

some1else 13y ago

The site is down for me. Here is the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1436&bih=806&sclient=psy-ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&gs_l=serp.3...12288.12981.1.13574.6.6.0.0.0.0.101.436.4j1.5.0...0.1...1c.1.12.psy-ab.bV51ytimoPc&pbx=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?biw=1436&bi... Update: Creepy. But I think most of this data can be lifted from other users who imported contacts from GMail. I think they must be matching only by name, because people could have been in touch with different mail addresses (at a previous employer, for instance).

interactually 13y ago
Sorry about that, I didn't expect the response the article got, should be resolved now. And thanks for posting the cached version!

jack-r-abbit 13y ago

The OP site is down so I don't know what they are citing as "creepy"... but I never considered LinkedIn to be a social network. It has always just been a professional network. It is my always on, mostly up to date resume. It has the who/what/where/when of my employment history. I have only accepted connections from people that I have worked with (and even then only those I actually worked with... not just anyone that worked at the same company but does not actually know me in some way) or friends that are in similar fields (and the rare cases of recruiters I've dealt with regarding employment). It actually bothers me that people use it to post twitter/facebook style status updates. LinkedIn is the last place I would think to read about someone's breakfast choice... but I've seen those updates before.

interactually 13y ago
Sorry about the crash, its back up now!

mikeevans 13y ago

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&aq=f&oq=cache%3Awww.interactually.com%2Flinkedin-creepiest-social-network%2F&aqs=chrome.0.57j58j60.2709j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.i...

Lewton 13y ago

I don't have a linkedin account. Should I? Does it provide value I can't find elsewhere?

TallGuyShort 13y ago
I think it's the best / most ubiquitous way to always have your up-to-date resume available, and to keep in touch with industry contacts.
- jaredmcateer 13y ago
  I like the hard copies Careers 2.0 prints out better but the Industry contacts on LinkedIn can't be beat.
jaredmcateer 13y ago
I get far more quality recruiters contacting me that I ever have from sites like Monster, most of the ones on LinkedIn know the difference between Java and JavaScript and they don't take the one line in my history 5 years ago that said I helped build a printer script in C# that was used by a clients SAP system to mean I have 15 years SAP experience.
reinhardt 13y ago
The value I get from it is mostly gathering intelligence about companies (e.g. size, new hires/leaves, key people in similar roles, etc), much less about actual "socializing". I very rarely initiate a connection, most of my (double digit only) contacts are by accepting invitations.
wtracy 13y ago
I find it to be a good way for recruiters to find me. That may or may not be something that you want.

oddshocks 13y ago

Redirected to your install.php file at this URL: http://www.interactually.com/linkedin-creepiest-social-network/wp-admin/install.php http://www.interactually.com/linkedin-creepiest-social-netwo...

edgely 13y ago

Site's down.

interactually 13y ago
Back up now, sorry about that!

michaelochurch 13y ago

Y'all know that I worked for Google. On this topic, I can only say good things about the place. When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard. Many of these "social" innovations that are popping up on the market place were rejected out-of-hand at Google because it holds itself to an extremely high ethical standard regarding user data, as it actually respects them. I was shocked, for example, when I learned that a certain social network gives universal profile access to employees as a perk. That would not happen at Google. If you looked at your high-school ex-girlfriend's email, you'd be fired immediately (and deserve it). Social is creepy, because it's all about being defined by other people, which is ridiculous and horrible. What, so do I suck at Programming Languages because I haven't trolled my 25 closest acquaintances for endorsements? Am I really going to become more credible in Machine Learning if I get 15 strangers to "endorse" me? The major conflict in "Social" is what I call "Document vs. Improve" (or: Exploit vs. Explore). A social app can expand the web of social connections and make it more efficient, but (a) that's really hard, and (b) there isn't a lot of short-term money in it. Or it can document social relationships that already exist, and make a shit-ton of money off the data. That's easy, but it doesn't actually make anyone's life better. Guess which one the mainstream social players favor? What I find depressing about LinkedIn is how much it has play-by-play replicated the old, broken way of doing things. Resumes. Titles and dates of employment. Recommendations. Recruiter spam. It feels like the Wayback Machine took us to 1995.

codegeek 13y ago
"broken way of doing things. Resumes. Titles and dates of employment. Recommendations. Recruiter spam" How would you do it differently ? Genuinely interested in your opinion on this.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Great question, and it'd take me a long time to answer. My first thought about resumes is that they serve two purposes, one legitimate and one not: (a) social status grading, which is easy for douchebags to game and for extortionists ("do <X> or I'll fire you and give you a bad reference") to abuse. (b) a list of "ask me about <X>" topics where X ranges over areas of professional expertise and interests, so they can probe you during the interview as to what you actually know. I'd focus on (b) while throwing (a) to the wind. One thought I had is an "allocate 20 points" system. You don't actually have to prove anything because resumes suck at that, but if you put "Machine Learning: 7" that shows that you view yourself as being "35%" Machine Learning and are fairly comfortable discussing it on an interview. This leads to the concept of a scarce graph, which is weighted but also imposes granularity (e.g. 20-point limit with 1-point minimum units) to prevent sprawl, and forces people to prioritize. Running graph algorithms against scarce graphs, with data pertaining to peoples' desires for connection (new jobs, new candidates) could be interesting. So there's that. You get as much legitimate information out of a 20-point allocation of interests and experience as you would out of a resume or a job posting. What you don't get is the social status bullshit (dates and titles). Ok, onto fixing the labor market in general, I think the best solution I can come up with is to build this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employment-with-consulting-call-options/ http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employ... That's Part I. Part II comes from the fact that, if Part I is build, people are going to want to get better, fast, at marketing themselves so their call options trade at a higher rate. That leads naturally into career coaching (a better model than traditional recruiting) but also into objective evaluation of, for example, source code quality. Now we can actually verify that, yes, John is a top-notch programmer and his $200/hr-struck call options actually aren't out of the money. Part III would be to use all the professional development data thus gathered and start scoring employers based on how much value they add to peoples' careers. How fast does a typical person grow, as a programmer, after 2 years at Google? What does it do for that person's employment potential 10 years down the road? Those would be great things to know.

joethrow 13y ago

On a throw away account. Several people have hit upon the major method LinkedIn uses which is that someone you know who has your name/email/... (or likely many someones) uploaded an address book to LinkedIn. LinkedIn then infers that because that person knows you, that you may know the other people they know (which is often true). They then combine that when a bunch of far more complicated inferences to generate the list. The goal of course is to provide suggestions to someone who just signed up. Sadly, the reason it feels creepy is because it seems like voodoo. They could do a better job explaining how it worked, but a lot of the bigger inferences are secret sauce.

onemorepassword 13y ago

It's not the creepiness that's relevant here. That's rather subjective, and as others have pointed out, all social networks do the same. What's most relevant here is that it's downright illegal in most Western countries LinkedIn e.a. operate in. Both collecting this information and sharing it without explicit (as in: not just default checked boxes) informed (as in: information about why, what and shared with whom) consent is not just unethical, it's a violation of most known privacy laws. The widespread practice of blatantly unethical business practices in our industry by both high profile companies and small start-ups alike is something we as professionals should take more seriously. If we don't, it doesn't only harm the image of our industry, but we'll be faced with ever more regulatory hurdles. The infamous EU cookie law is just the beginning if we don't act to clean up our own industry. Every second web company seems to have a business model that directly or indirectly generates revenue through stalking people on a massive scale. This cannot possible be sustainable without a huge backlash.

blhack 13y ago

I finally joined linkedin about a week ago, and it just feels...scammy. It's interesting to me (or frightening) that some of the smartest people I know have the fewest endorsements. People I know doing [1]actual real work on things like "microcontrollers" have...3-4 endorsements with them, but people who I know have only maybe installed Linux, have 20 or so endorsements for "linux". There are people I know who are post-graduate level experts on certain fields, and those fields are either not listed at all, or they have maybe 1 or 2 endorsements for it. Stupid. I'll keep just linking people to my github, and showing them projects I've built. [1]: Actual real work as in: writing libraries that other people use. Contributing to the community in ways that effect the entire community.

dgallagher 13y ago
Speculating: Perhaps people who have lesser skills make up for it by networking, asking others to endorse them to fluff up their profile? Those with valuable skill sets might have little need for that, and can promote themselves more optimally. Example: "So-and-So endorses me for Programming" vs. "github.com/myrepo/"
thetrb 13y ago
The number of endorsements is really just a matter of the number of connections and a persons activity on Linkedin (e.g. if a person endorses many others, then it's likely they will also be endorsed by them).
wtetzner 13y ago
The endorsements on LinkedIn are useless. LinkedIn suggests things like "Endorse [So and So] for [some thing]," and people just click the "endorse" button. People that know nothing about technology have endorsed me for skills I don't have.
- iffyuva 13y ago
  That endorsements looks more or less like a poll. People with whom I have barely worked also endorsed me! Very creepy!

tloudon 13y ago

probably worth pointing out that LI doesn't have ads and makes its money from subscribers, most of whom i'm guessing are sales/recruiting. from a pure-business-no-ethics perspective, why would you care what anyone else thought? w/ that point of view: every connection or link, however creepy, makes the system as whole more valuable to subscribers. personally, the feature doesn't have enough churn, so i always see the same 5 faces, 99% of the time it's background...otherwise it would probably creep me out slash annoy more.

localhost3000 13y ago

funny this should come up today. the girl i am currently dating happens to be both attractive and asian. i was on her linkedin yesterday and noticed that the "people also viewed" widget was 100% other young, good-looking asian women. so, add race as a vector to the linkedin creep graph...

interactually 13y ago
I'm glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that. I was admittedly hesitant to add that part to the story.

yid 13y ago

bifrost 13y ago

Eh, LinkedIn says that there are other people that work for my company that I might know. The only problem is, I'm an officer of my company, I know everyone who works there and they're all on my Linkedin. The people its suggesting, work for a similarly named company, about 1000 miles away... Score 1 for accuracy...

datums 13y ago

How was Doug connected ? Doug while only communicating with you via email imported his contacts. His contacts include you. There's the connection. Works similarly on FB. When that business associate imports contacts aka connections, they find you on the other side :) It's really that simple

JoeKM 13y ago

If you're a programmer I see no reason to have a LinkedIn profile. GitHub is better for résumé and networking.

ttrreeww 13y ago

As long as LinkedIn continues to get me high paying jobs, it is all good.

rjempson 13y ago

I don't like LinkedIn for similar reasons but I somehow feel I will offend people if I drop out, and I have had some decent leads from it over the years. The import contacts feature is particularly nefarious, it says "import" but it actually keeps checking down the track (or at least it used to work like that).

rooker 13y ago

I did the "attractive women" thing (took a hit for the team, for science) and that was absolutely true. The odd thing was, the first random girl I clicked on was this girl I kinda had a crush on in college (all my "People you may know" recommendations were from college, even as I'm three years out) who happened to be Asian. Then...all of the "Also Viewed" were fairly attractive, well-groomed Asian women. Isn't that interesting? I thought at the very least it would break me out of race, but apparently they're their own class. The other thing I'll say is perhaps this author is tapped out of "People you may know" and LinkedIn is simply guessing . Mine looks fairly reasonable, random, and not like they were digging particularly deep.

kashrr 13y ago

I was just feeling creeped out going to my linkedin page and seeing one of my wife's relatives in the recommendation and wondering how the hell? Then i come and see this in hacker news! Talk about timing. I think linkedin creeps me out a little more than usual because, with facebook for example i almost expect them to pull off stuff like this. And since linkedin is a professional network, maybe i expected them to be more professional :)

pootch 13y ago

Not only is linked in creepy...it sucks. Hopefully Yahoo will buy them and shut them down and then we can ignore it forever like everything else Yahoo does.

lololomg 13y ago

If LinkedIn would just stop spamming me I'd be sooo happy. I don't even know where they got my email address!

laurent123456 13y ago

I also don't like how they recently changed the invitation email titles to "XXX, good to see you on LinkedIn", as it makes it look like it's a personal message, when it's not.

neduma 13y ago

Just deleted my account today.

qompiler 13y ago

LinkedIn leaks privacy information through their "also viewed" section. Applied to a new job and started working there, after a few months I decided to look up my managers LinkedIn profile, only to notice that on his page the "also viewed" section showed employees from my older company and family. So yeah, so now I know he was trying to figure out more about me through LinkedIn.

harryf 13y ago
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. In your example isn't a good thing to know your new boss did this? Social networks encourage creepy behavior amongst their users. LinkedIn lets you know who viewed your profile while Facebook doesn't. Personally I'd rather know.
- qompiler 13y ago
  Not a bad thing for me no.. this time! I don't think anyone is giving explicit permission to let the world know they have been snooping around other people's profiles. Although this information is not directly published it leaks through their "features".