7 ms·

LinkedIn sued by users who say it hacked their e-mail accounts

213 points by shawndumas 13y ago

livestyle 13y ago
It's just Growth Hacking, nothing to see here.
andmarios 13y ago
I abstain from LinkedIn deliberately and I can confirm that I am sick from their spam. Every time a friend joins their network, I get tons of “invitations to connect”, despite the fact that I have “unsubscribed” from their spam-list (to which I never subscribed in the first place) enough times. Real professionals should not need spammy social networks to prove themselves.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > Real professionals should not need spammy social networks to prove themselves. Yup. As far as I can tell/am concerned, the old fashioned 'meatspace'-networking method never stopped working. I get recruiter spammed without them, so even for that they don't seem necessary.
- jakub_g 13y ago
  2 options: either give LI a secondary email (5 minutes to create a new gmail/other account for spam), or create filters (label as "linkedin-spam" and move out of inbox). Works like a charm for me.
- goostavos 13y ago
  Hope that remains true. My strategy is a giant github page... And that's kind of it. We'll see how viable that strategy is..
yeukhon 13y ago
thank god someone took this step. LinkedIn. I will never work for you. I don't like your service. One time I chose to only send invite to several friends. Instead, Linkedin sent out invites to every single person on my gmail contact list, some are public mailing list and it was embarrassing. Linus way: FU LinkedIn. Your UI sucks.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
wfunction 13y ago
I used to think people were just being ignorant, and that if they had read the screen they would've known to not give out their passwords. Then I got a LinkedIn account and almost got tricked into typing my credentials... it was only when the Google authorization screen came up that I realized what had happened.
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  Then I got a LinkedIn account and almost got tricked into typing my credentials More detail needed here. how did they almost trick you? what did they say or what did they display that made you think it was something different. surely when you were entering the details, it was still clear you were on linkedin's website? No? (this is a genuine question.. I don't have a linkedin account)
  - jaredsohn 13y ago
    They display a prompt asking for a username and password. It is easy to think that it is asking the person to log into the site. If somebody uses the same password for their email and LinkedIn, it can trick that person into giving LinkedIn permission to read their email.
    - anaphor 13y ago
      OK so they're using phishing techniques. Definitely cracking if that's the case. Arguably the entire site is one big phishing scam.
  - wfunction 13y ago
    Right after you log in, they display a page that looks almost exactly like a login page asking for your email address and password. I didn't read the page -- I assumed it was either a "verify your email" or "authentication failed" page of some sort, so I entered my Gmail email address and password. (No, I didn't enter my Gmail password. Read below.) There is REALLY easy-to-miss "skip" link (I forget the exact text) on the page, but the page looks so much like a login window or "verify your address" window or some other window like that that you don't realize it (and think the "skip" link is probably saying something typical like "Forgot your password?"), so you go ahead and type your credentials -- even though you've already logged in. The only thing that saved me was the fact that Google asked me if I wanted to "Allow Access" or not, and that made my heart skip a beat and I finally realized what had happened. Thanks Google. The scary part is that you DON'T have to type in your Google password for this to work! In fact, I typed in my LinkedIn password (I'm not quite stupid enough to type in my Google password on LinkedIn's website) -- but Google still popped up a window asking me for permission, because I was already logged into Google and it didn't even bother checking my password. So LinkedIn almost got my permission without me ever entering my Gmail password... I almost granted access (thinking it might have been an OpenID thing) before I came to my senses and thought, WTF just happened right now?! Hell no!
TheSwordsman 13y ago
LinkedIn is the primary reason I'm cautious to link my different services to something external (facebook, twitter, etc.). Even those I'm a bit more lax on compared to my email. Nothing, but me and my devices, should ever have a reason to access my email. If someone or something is trying to access my email, even with explicit permission, there's no way they can be up to anything good. The activities that originate from LinkedIn touching your email account is definitely sketchy at best, and definitely spam. There doesn't seem to be a good way to stop unwanted emails going to a single address. Hell, I've found that even getting them to stop sending you emails regarding your account / groups you joined doesn't always work. Speaking to their support department ends in a response with something like "our engineers are aware" with no change in behavior. Half of me wants to just get rid of LinkedIn, the other half of me likes seeing old acquaintances getting promotions/moving on to greener pastures. === Dear LinkedIn, Please stop being scummy...we'd all appreciate it. Cheers! -Everyone from the Internet
- bostik 13y ago
  > LinkedIn is the primary reason I'm cautious to link my different services to something external I've gone further. I routinely create email aliases for any new services I may need to use. (Yes, I have one dedicated to HN too.) That gives me quite a few nice features: 1) My email addresses are not generally cross-service 2) It's somewhat harder to consolidate my data even when the addresses are "leaked" (read: sold) from one service to another 3) I see with absolute clarity which service my email address was siphoned from. 4) I can trivially delete the address. It's just a line in /etc/aliases. For #3, I haven't done any accurate measurements but it seems that an address finds its way to spammer lists about as often through the service selling it as it does from a user of that service inadvertantly placing it on one.
  - AhtiK 13y ago
    GMail has a little trick that you can postfix anything to your email address username separated with a "+". For example my.name+linkedin@gmail.com. Later this +postfix makes it easier to find out which source is the leak. Most of the websites let you sign up with "+" in your e-mail but unfortunately not every site. The other trick is that GMail ignores "." in email user so my.name can be just as well "myname". Not that it helps with the spam, just a sidenote.
fragsworth 13y ago
This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone felt like they are "typecast" into a certain industry or job position by their LinkedIn profiles? What if you don't want to stay with the same industry for the rest of your life? All your contacts probably already endorsed you for your skills in a that industry. It seems like a situation that increases friction in trying to move between fields, industries, and job positions. Should you delete your profile? Would it seem weird to potential employers/business relationships that you are missing a LinkedIn profile? I think this will become a more visible problem in the near future.
- dangero 13y ago
  Totally agree with your concerns. There's also another piece to this that I've run into: Deliberately focusing my profile on specific skills increased the number of recruiters that contact me for job opportunities. One might say that this is just marketing on my part, but with LinkedIn, your profile actually functions like a webpage would where you need to optimize the keywords and information for their search engine. By being more focused, you rank higher in searches.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  How does it harm your future? It's nice to have someone who has multiple skills.
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    To some people, having multiple skillsets means you're unfocused, because you haven't focused on a single skillset.
    - louthy 13y ago
      And those people aren't worth working for.
      - alok-g 13y ago
        Unfortunately, they seem to be the majority.
daviddaviddavid 13y ago
The "People You May Know" feature of LinkedIn is downright disturbing. Everyone in my third-party email's Address Book shows up as a person I may know. This includes people without LinkedIn accounts, people who've been dead for years that I never removed, people that I've only ever exchanged a single email with. I never gave LinkedIn my email creds (I'm astounded that they have the gall to ask for my email password). Also, it is 100% inconceivable to me that all of these people would have given LinkedIn access to their email accounts.
- Aloisius 13y ago
  People without LinkedIn accounts? Are you quite certain? I worked at LinkedIn and know exactly how People You May Know used to work (I've looked at the code). Unless they changed something in the last couple years (and given their dev cycle, I doubt it), every single person who it recommends has signed up to LinkedIn. Of course, I heard people make these claims while I worked there too. Also, it really isn't that hard to guess how it works (hint: are you sure you need every single person to give address books access to build a graph?).
  - officemonkey 13y ago
    My friends cats (who have email addresses but have never signed up on Linkedin) show up as "People You May Know." Explain that one.
    - whbk 13y ago
      I think you should first explain why you're friends with someone who makes an email for their cat ;)
      - officemonkey 13y ago
        So they can get Facebook pages, duh.
    - aptwebapps 13y ago
scarmig 13y ago
Does anyone have any alternatives to LinkedIn? I think it plays a function that's useful, particularly the floating, easily discoverable resumes you can point people at plus recommendations. But the cons just drastically reduce its overall value well below zero. The resume aspect is easy enough to host yourself, and the searchability is not clearly an overall pro anyways: I really don't want to be harassed by random recruiters who found me using a keyword search. But would it be weird to host your recommendations of others on your own site? I.e. include a link to some canonical representation of their identity and vouch for them? That may be getting into the weird territory. And what about hosting their recommendations of you? That seems well into the weird territory. Maybe the best thing that LinkedIn offers is a willingly creepy networking site that gives you an excuse to ignore social norms.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  What you're describing reminds me of the never-launched social network Diaspora, but for business. Would someone be interested in trying to launch a Diaspora-nee-Linkedin?
- driverdan 13y ago
  How is it weird to get recommendations from other people? That's pretty normal. Posting them on a website might seem unusual for individuals but companies do it all the time.
  - scarmig 13y ago
    It's the posting on a personal website that sets off my awkwardness meter. I think recommendations in general, though, are quite useful.
- anaphor 13y ago
  http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ http://careers.stackoverflow.com/
  - dreen 13y ago
    This. My LinkedIn profile contains only thing: "To see my current online profile, please visit http://..." http://..." (link to careers.so) I lost my first job after uni three months ago and started looking. People told me I'm severely limiting my chances by not having a full LinkedIn profile. They were wrong, I found an amazing job and the bulk of interview offers came from people seeing my SO, C.SO or GitHub profiles. C.SO doesnt have all the meaningless social bullshit, also top companies and recruiters pay a lot of money to just use their search engine. Also, all LinkedIn mail gets redirected to the bin.
brador 13y ago
> which allows the company to slurp up the contacts list of the third-party e-mail account with which the member signed up, if the member is logged into that e-mail account in the same browser. Is this a thing? Can any website slurp my contacts if i have hotmail or gmail open in the same browser? How are they doing this?
- nwh 13y ago
  They can't unless there's a vulnerability in Gmail that they're exploiting, and that wouldn't go down at all well.
eonil 13y ago
LinkedIn has tried phishing people to take email account using username(so the email address)/password entered when login. I really scared on it when I discovered it. I could avoid this because I was using different password for mail account, anyway I think many people gave their email account to LinkedIn silently. And now they are finally getting punished.
- krstck 13y ago
  I had always purposefully avoided giving LinkedIn my email password, but when I just clicked the link to remove contacts given upthread, somehow LinkedIn magically had all of my email contacts. So, I gave it to them at some point. I am really displeased.
  - eonil 13y ago
    I recommend to participate on lawsuit if you're on america... You may get a lot of rewards.
cubicle67 13y ago
I deleted my LinkedIn account some time back, but I still get email like this (copy from actual email, not paraphrased) Subject: [Freind]'s invitation is awaiting your response Body: [Friend] would like to connect on LinkedIn. How would you like to respond? [Photo of friend] Confirm you know [Friend] ... and ... Subject: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn Body: [Photo of friend] [Me], I'd like to include you in my network to share updates and stay in touch. - [Friend] All emails sent from friend's email account, not LinkedIn. I've confirmed with friend that they were completely unaware of this and were quite embarrassed. Not cool, LinkedIn, and most definitely dishonest.
- trailfox 13y ago
  Creating a LinkedIn account was by far the creepiest thing I've ever experienced when signing up. I signed up using email address A, and when I signed in I saw suggestions for "people you may know", but it included people I had only every corresponded with via email address B (bear with me here, it gets more interesting...). It wasn't even people any of my contacts know. From what I can tell people I had corresponded with using email address B (which incidentally doesn't even have a real name associated with it) had given their password to LinkedIn (probably via 'find people you know' or whatever). It seems that LinkedIn went through my friends' gmail contacts and one or more of my friends had probably annotated me in their contact list with my actual name. LinkedIn then associated my name with email address B. From that LinkedIn combined it with more info from people who gave them their gmail address and password who I'd only ever corresponded with a few times anonymously via my unnamed address (B, which LinkedIn has now linked with my name). Net result is "people you may know" including people I had only corresponded with anonymously via email address B with full details of their name and place of work etc. What makes it creepy I used email address B when I tried online dating a few years ago. I used email address B to first get to know people before deciding whether to give them more info about me etc. Now LinkedIn has kindly provided me with the full name and place of employment of the women I chatted to via "people you may know" (I recognised their photos from the dating site from a few years ago) and vice versa (yikes! a great way to wind up getting stalked). The only link between me and "people you may know" is that I corresponded with them via an email address not even associated with my LinkedIn account, and none of my friends or contacts is in any way associated with them. If that isn't creepy I don't know what is.
Renaud 13y ago
I really do not understand how LinkedIn is still in business after all the crap they have pulled over time: they have been trampling on their users for years. Is everyone so cheap that they wouldn't pay for a professional that would not have to resort to these fishy and downright scammy (scummy) tactics? What does it say about the value of your professional life when all you can afford to further it is to give that much power to an organisation whose sole incentive is to make money off your back by whatever means necessary?
- r0h1n 13y ago
  Maybe because most professionals think the costs outweigh the benefits, and because there are no suitable alternatives? LinkedIn's value also seems to become dearer the higher up you go in organizational hierarchies. And their canny strategies to hook more of the C-suite (e.g. 'Influencer Posts') seem to be working quite well. I see superbly shitty posts like Vivek Wadhwa's "Facebook is Doomed" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424292) doing great on the 'LinkedIn Today' home page for days [Edit: Just checked. It's been on my home page for 4 days now!]. Thus proving that the mediocrity (which tends to be rise to the top in large organizations) is truly flourishing at the top of LinkedIn's food chain :)
mswe 13y ago
I deleted my account but it's not even deleted. Hope other lawyers take on them and sue the hell out of them. HATE LINKEDIN!
- 90002 13y ago
  Agreed. LI has become far too intrusive as of late, and I really hate that some folks in different industries, specifically tech, value this as the end-all, be-all. If I have to miss out on certain opportunities due to my lack visibility on LNKD, then so be it. Just not a fan of what they're doing over there-at all.
jval 13y ago
I would presume that their acquisition of Rapportive plays some part in their use of emails and recommendations. I know for a fact I have never given them access to my email accounts but they have started surfacing 'people you may know' recommendations that are actually email addresses from my contact book where I have Rapportive installed.
gurkendoktor 13y ago
The saddest announcement about OS X 10.9 was that Apple will add LinkedIn support. No one should support a cheap scam company like them, much less bake them into the operating system :(
Fourplealis 13y ago
There was discussion about this day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421742
nwzpaperman 13y ago
LinkedIn is great if you need more emails in your inbox to boost your self-importance quotient, but I haven't heard of anyone in my sphere that was discovered and hired due to LI. It seems all of the technology companies are givin their best effort to invading privacy and undermining trust on a societal level. There will be lasting consequences for these behaviors.
- pinaceae 13y ago
  really depends on your job profile. it is a big factor in consulting and similar jobs. very job mobile crowd, hard to keep track where they are right now - linkedin makes it easy. self updating rolodex for people that change employers frequently.
anodari 13y ago
Surely they use deceptive techniques to try to broaden the base. I would not doubt they improperly accessing the email accounts when someone uses the same password to register.
Paul_S 13y ago
Any person who used their company email to sign up to linkedin and then leaked the password by giving it to linkedin should be sued by the company that employs them for negligence. They are the same people who re-use their passwords and write them on post-it notes. Frankly I have no sympathy for them at all. As you can probably tell.
- dpatrick86 13y ago
  So, you're saying you want the majority of the working population to be sued by their employing company which itself is made up of people that by and large are guilty of the exact same behavior? It has become abundantly clear this is a pet peeve of yours!
  - Paul_S 13y ago
    Sorry, I am probably overreacting. It does annoy me every time people complain about security or privacy when they themselves hold those two in the lowest regard possibly crossing over to contempt. And in some cases those people know what they are doing is lazy and wrong and do it anyway. I start looking for the bottle just thinking about it.
celticjames 13y ago
Gmail has a feature that lets you see what IP addresses you have logged on from. (Look for the little link at the bottom right.) Would LinkedIn's IP show up there if they are using your google password? Has anyone ever seen this behaviour?

213 points by shawndumas 13y ago

It's just Growth Hacking, nothing to see here.

I abstain from LinkedIn deliberately and I can confirm that I am sick from their spam. Every time a friend joins their network, I get tons of “invitations to connect”, despite the fact that I have “unsubscribed” from their spam-list (to which I never subscribed in the first place) enough times. Real professionals should not need spammy social networks to prove themselves.

jlgreco 13y ago
> Real professionals should not need spammy social networks to prove themselves. Yup. As far as I can tell/am concerned, the old fashioned 'meatspace'-networking method never stopped working. I get recruiter spammed without them, so even for that they don't seem necessary.
jakub_g 13y ago
2 options: either give LI a secondary email (5 minutes to create a new gmail/other account for spam), or create filters (label as "linkedin-spam" and move out of inbox). Works like a charm for me.
goostavos 13y ago
Hope that remains true. My strategy is a giant github page... And that's kind of it. We'll see how viable that strategy is..

yeukhon 13y ago

thank god someone took this step. LinkedIn. I will never work for you. I don't like your service. One time I chose to only send invite to several friends. Instead, Linkedin sent out invites to every single person on my gmail contact list, some are public mailing list and it was embarrassing. Linus way: FU LinkedIn. Your UI sucks.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

wfunction 13y ago

I used to think people were just being ignorant, and that if they had read the screen they would've known to not give out their passwords. Then I got a LinkedIn account and almost got tricked into typing my credentials... it was only when the Google authorization screen came up that I realized what had happened.

rgbrenner 13y ago
Then I got a LinkedIn account and almost got tricked into typing my credentials More detail needed here. how did they almost trick you? what did they say or what did they display that made you think it was something different. surely when you were entering the details, it was still clear you were on linkedin's website? No? (this is a genuine question.. I don't have a linkedin account)
- jaredsohn 13y ago
  They display a prompt asking for a username and password. It is easy to think that it is asking the person to log into the site. If somebody uses the same password for their email and LinkedIn, it can trick that person into giving LinkedIn permission to read their email.
  - anaphor 13y ago
    OK so they're using phishing techniques. Definitely cracking if that's the case. Arguably the entire site is one big phishing scam.
- wfunction 13y ago
  Right after you log in, they display a page that looks almost exactly like a login page asking for your email address and password. I didn't read the page -- I assumed it was either a "verify your email" or "authentication failed" page of some sort, so I entered my Gmail email address and password. (No, I didn't enter my Gmail password. Read below.) There is REALLY easy-to-miss "skip" link (I forget the exact text) on the page, but the page looks so much like a login window or "verify your address" window or some other window like that that you don't realize it (and think the "skip" link is probably saying something typical like "Forgot your password?"), so you go ahead and type your credentials -- even though you've already logged in. The only thing that saved me was the fact that Google asked me if I wanted to "Allow Access" or not, and that made my heart skip a beat and I finally realized what had happened. Thanks Google. The scary part is that you DON'T have to type in your Google password for this to work! In fact, I typed in my LinkedIn password (I'm not quite stupid enough to type in my Google password on LinkedIn's website) -- but Google still popped up a window asking me for permission, because I was already logged into Google and it didn't even bother checking my password. So LinkedIn almost got my permission without me ever entering my Gmail password... I almost granted access (thinking it might have been an OpenID thing) before I came to my senses and thought, WTF just happened right now?! Hell no!

TheSwordsman 13y ago

LinkedIn is the primary reason I'm cautious to link my different services to something external (facebook, twitter, etc.). Even those I'm a bit more lax on compared to my email. Nothing, but me and my devices, should ever have a reason to access my email. If someone or something is trying to access my email, even with explicit permission, there's no way they can be up to anything good. The activities that originate from LinkedIn touching your email account is definitely sketchy at best, and definitely spam. There doesn't seem to be a good way to stop unwanted emails going to a single address. Hell, I've found that even getting them to stop sending you emails regarding your account / groups you joined doesn't always work. Speaking to their support department ends in a response with something like "our engineers are aware" with no change in behavior. Half of me wants to just get rid of LinkedIn, the other half of me likes seeing old acquaintances getting promotions/moving on to greener pastures. === Dear LinkedIn, Please stop being scummy...we'd all appreciate it. Cheers! -Everyone from the Internet

bostik 13y ago
> LinkedIn is the primary reason I'm cautious to link my different services to something external I've gone further. I routinely create email aliases for any new services I may need to use. (Yes, I have one dedicated to HN too.) That gives me quite a few nice features: 1) My email addresses are not generally cross-service 2) It's somewhat harder to consolidate my data even when the addresses are "leaked" (read: sold) from one service to another 3) I see with absolute clarity which service my email address was siphoned from. 4) I can trivially delete the address. It's just a line in /etc/aliases. For #3, I haven't done any accurate measurements but it seems that an address finds its way to spammer lists about as often through the service selling it as it does from a user of that service inadvertantly placing it on one.
- AhtiK 13y ago
  GMail has a little trick that you can postfix anything to your email address username separated with a "+". For example my.name+linkedin@gmail.com. Later this +postfix makes it easier to find out which source is the leak. Most of the websites let you sign up with "+" in your e-mail but unfortunately not every site. The other trick is that GMail ignores "." in email user so my.name can be just as well "myname". Not that it helps with the spam, just a sidenote.

fragsworth 13y ago

This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone felt like they are "typecast" into a certain industry or job position by their LinkedIn profiles? What if you don't want to stay with the same industry for the rest of your life? All your contacts probably already endorsed you for your skills in a that industry. It seems like a situation that increases friction in trying to move between fields, industries, and job positions. Should you delete your profile? Would it seem weird to potential employers/business relationships that you are missing a LinkedIn profile? I think this will become a more visible problem in the near future.

dangero 13y ago
Totally agree with your concerns. There's also another piece to this that I've run into: Deliberately focusing my profile on specific skills increased the number of recruiters that contact me for job opportunities. One might say that this is just marketing on my part, but with LinkedIn, your profile actually functions like a webpage would where you need to optimize the keywords and information for their search engine. By being more focused, you rank higher in searches.
yeukhon 13y ago
How does it harm your future? It's nice to have someone who has multiple skills.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  To some people, having multiple skillsets means you're unfocused, because you haven't focused on a single skillset.
  - louthy 13y ago
    And those people aren't worth working for.
    - alok-g 13y ago
      Unfortunately, they seem to be the majority.

daviddaviddavid 13y ago

The "People You May Know" feature of LinkedIn is downright disturbing. Everyone in my third-party email's Address Book shows up as a person I may know. This includes people without LinkedIn accounts, people who've been dead for years that I never removed, people that I've only ever exchanged a single email with. I never gave LinkedIn my email creds (I'm astounded that they have the gall to ask for my email password). Also, it is 100% inconceivable to me that all of these people would have given LinkedIn access to their email accounts.

Aloisius 13y ago
People without LinkedIn accounts? Are you quite certain? I worked at LinkedIn and know exactly how People You May Know used to work (I've looked at the code). Unless they changed something in the last couple years (and given their dev cycle, I doubt it), every single person who it recommends has signed up to LinkedIn. Of course, I heard people make these claims while I worked there too. Also, it really isn't that hard to guess how it works (hint: are you sure you need every single person to give address books access to build a graph?).
- officemonkey 13y ago
  My friends cats (who have email addresses but have never signed up on Linkedin) show up as "People You May Know." Explain that one.
  - whbk 13y ago
    I think you should first explain why you're friends with someone who makes an email for their cat ;)
    - officemonkey 13y ago
      So they can get Facebook pages, duh.
  - aptwebapps 13y ago

scarmig 13y ago

Does anyone have any alternatives to LinkedIn? I think it plays a function that's useful, particularly the floating, easily discoverable resumes you can point people at plus recommendations. But the cons just drastically reduce its overall value well below zero. The resume aspect is easy enough to host yourself, and the searchability is not clearly an overall pro anyways: I really don't want to be harassed by random recruiters who found me using a keyword search. But would it be weird to host your recommendations of others on your own site? I.e. include a link to some canonical representation of their identity and vouch for them? That may be getting into the weird territory. And what about hosting their recommendations of you? That seems well into the weird territory. Maybe the best thing that LinkedIn offers is a willingly creepy networking site that gives you an excuse to ignore social norms.

stephengillie 13y ago
What you're describing reminds me of the never-launched social network Diaspora, but for business. Would someone be interested in trying to launch a Diaspora-nee-Linkedin?
driverdan 13y ago
How is it weird to get recommendations from other people? That's pretty normal. Posting them on a website might seem unusual for individuals but companies do it all the time.
- scarmig 13y ago
  It's the posting on a personal website that sets off my awkwardness meter. I think recommendations in general, though, are quite useful.
anaphor 13y ago
http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ http://careers.stackoverflow.com/
- dreen 13y ago
  This. My LinkedIn profile contains only thing: "To see my current online profile, please visit http://..." http://..." (link to careers.so) I lost my first job after uni three months ago and started looking. People told me I'm severely limiting my chances by not having a full LinkedIn profile. They were wrong, I found an amazing job and the bulk of interview offers came from people seeing my SO, C.SO or GitHub profiles. C.SO doesnt have all the meaningless social bullshit, also top companies and recruiters pay a lot of money to just use their search engine. Also, all LinkedIn mail gets redirected to the bin.

brador 13y ago

> which allows the company to slurp up the contacts list of the third-party e-mail account with which the member signed up, if the member is logged into that e-mail account in the same browser. Is this a thing? Can any website slurp my contacts if i have hotmail or gmail open in the same browser? How are they doing this?

nwh 13y ago
They can't unless there's a vulnerability in Gmail that they're exploiting, and that wouldn't go down at all well.

eonil 13y ago

LinkedIn has tried phishing people to take email account using username(so the email address)/password entered when login. I really scared on it when I discovered it. I could avoid this because I was using different password for mail account, anyway I think many people gave their email account to LinkedIn silently. And now they are finally getting punished.

krstck 13y ago
I had always purposefully avoided giving LinkedIn my email password, but when I just clicked the link to remove contacts given upthread, somehow LinkedIn magically had all of my email contacts. So, I gave it to them at some point. I am really displeased.
- eonil 13y ago
  I recommend to participate on lawsuit if you're on america... You may get a lot of rewards.

cubicle67 13y ago

I deleted my LinkedIn account some time back, but I still get email like this (copy from actual email, not paraphrased) Subject: [Freind]'s invitation is awaiting your response Body: [Friend] would like to connect on LinkedIn. How would you like to respond? [Photo of friend] Confirm you know [Friend] ... and ... Subject: Invitation to connect on LinkedIn Body: [Photo of friend] [Me], I'd like to include you in my network to share updates and stay in touch. - [Friend] All emails sent from friend's email account, not LinkedIn. I've confirmed with friend that they were completely unaware of this and were quite embarrassed. Not cool, LinkedIn, and most definitely dishonest.

trailfox 13y ago
Creating a LinkedIn account was by far the creepiest thing I've ever experienced when signing up. I signed up using email address A, and when I signed in I saw suggestions for "people you may know", but it included people I had only every corresponded with via email address B (bear with me here, it gets more interesting...). It wasn't even people any of my contacts know. From what I can tell people I had corresponded with using email address B (which incidentally doesn't even have a real name associated with it) had given their password to LinkedIn (probably via 'find people you know' or whatever). It seems that LinkedIn went through my friends' gmail contacts and one or more of my friends had probably annotated me in their contact list with my actual name. LinkedIn then associated my name with email address B. From that LinkedIn combined it with more info from people who gave them their gmail address and password who I'd only ever corresponded with a few times anonymously via my unnamed address (B, which LinkedIn has now linked with my name). Net result is "people you may know" including people I had only corresponded with anonymously via email address B with full details of their name and place of work etc. What makes it creepy I used email address B when I tried online dating a few years ago. I used email address B to first get to know people before deciding whether to give them more info about me etc. Now LinkedIn has kindly provided me with the full name and place of employment of the women I chatted to via "people you may know" (I recognised their photos from the dating site from a few years ago) and vice versa (yikes! a great way to wind up getting stalked). The only link between me and "people you may know" is that I corresponded with them via an email address not even associated with my LinkedIn account, and none of my friends or contacts is in any way associated with them. If that isn't creepy I don't know what is.

Renaud 13y ago

I really do not understand how LinkedIn is still in business after all the crap they have pulled over time: they have been trampling on their users for years. Is everyone so cheap that they wouldn't pay for a professional that would not have to resort to these fishy and downright scammy (scummy) tactics? What does it say about the value of your professional life when all you can afford to further it is to give that much power to an organisation whose sole incentive is to make money off your back by whatever means necessary?

r0h1n 13y ago
Maybe because most professionals think the costs outweigh the benefits, and because there are no suitable alternatives? LinkedIn's value also seems to become dearer the higher up you go in organizational hierarchies. And their canny strategies to hook more of the C-suite (e.g. 'Influencer Posts') seem to be working quite well. I see superbly shitty posts like Vivek Wadhwa's "Facebook is Doomed" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6424292) doing great on the 'LinkedIn Today' home page for days [Edit: Just checked. It's been on my home page for 4 days now!]. Thus proving that the mediocrity (which tends to be rise to the top in large organizations) is truly flourishing at the top of LinkedIn's food chain :)

mswe 13y ago

I deleted my account but it's not even deleted. Hope other lawyers take on them and sue the hell out of them. HATE LINKEDIN!

90002 13y ago
Agreed. LI has become far too intrusive as of late, and I really hate that some folks in different industries, specifically tech, value this as the end-all, be-all. If I have to miss out on certain opportunities due to my lack visibility on LNKD, then so be it. Just not a fan of what they're doing over there-at all.

jval 13y ago

I would presume that their acquisition of Rapportive plays some part in their use of emails and recommendations. I know for a fact I have never given them access to my email accounts but they have started surfacing 'people you may know' recommendations that are actually email addresses from my contact book where I have Rapportive installed.

gurkendoktor 13y ago

The saddest announcement about OS X 10.9 was that Apple will add LinkedIn support. No one should support a cheap scam company like them, much less bake them into the operating system :(

Fourplealis 13y ago

There was discussion about this day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6421742

nwzpaperman 13y ago

LinkedIn is great if you need more emails in your inbox to boost your self-importance quotient, but I haven't heard of anyone in my sphere that was discovered and hired due to LI. It seems all of the technology companies are givin their best effort to invading privacy and undermining trust on a societal level. There will be lasting consequences for these behaviors.

pinaceae 13y ago
really depends on your job profile. it is a big factor in consulting and similar jobs. very job mobile crowd, hard to keep track where they are right now - linkedin makes it easy. self updating rolodex for people that change employers frequently.

anodari 13y ago

Surely they use deceptive techniques to try to broaden the base. I would not doubt they improperly accessing the email accounts when someone uses the same password to register.

Paul_S 13y ago

Any person who used their company email to sign up to linkedin and then leaked the password by giving it to linkedin should be sued by the company that employs them for negligence. They are the same people who re-use their passwords and write them on post-it notes. Frankly I have no sympathy for them at all. As you can probably tell.

dpatrick86 13y ago
So, you're saying you want the majority of the working population to be sued by their employing company which itself is made up of people that by and large are guilty of the exact same behavior? It has become abundantly clear this is a pet peeve of yours!
- Paul_S 13y ago
  Sorry, I am probably overreacting. It does annoy me every time people complain about security or privacy when they themselves hold those two in the lowest regard possibly crossing over to contempt. And in some cases those people know what they are doing is lazy and wrong and do it anyway. I start looking for the bottle just thinking about it.

celticjames 13y ago

Gmail has a feature that lets you see what IP addresses you have logged on from. (Look for the little link at the bottom right.) Would LinkedIn's IP show up there if they are using your google password? Has anyone ever seen this behaviour?