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LinkedIn ‘Intro’duces Insecurity
- csmatt 13y agoLinkedIn just seems overwhelmingly sleezy to me. How do they keep getting away with this stuff?
- cowboy_coder 13y agoHN is a huge LinkedIn fanboy site. Surprised to see this.
- tedunangst 13y agoPeople tell LinkedIn "Please, please, pretty please build something that lets me view LinkedIn contact info while reading email on my phone." LinkedIn builds it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago> People tell LinkedIn "Please, please, pretty please build something that lets me view LinkedIn contact info while reading email on my phone." Did they? Did they really?
- krapp 13y agoTo be fair, he didn't say which people...
- tedunangst 13y agoNo. LinkedIn spent considerable effort building something that nobody wants and nobody will opt into.
- nilved 13y agoI think you're joking, but we both know this isn't the first time they've done that.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago> No. LinkedIn spent considerable effort building something that nobody wants That's pretty much what I thought, i.e "LinkedIn spent considerable effort building something that very few of their users want". Thanks for confirming that there's no evidence otherwise. It's more common than you may think, especially for companies where the user is not a paying customer and the feature benefits the company. Sure somebody wants this feature. Somebody who works for linkedin and isn't a security geek. And for companies with poor-decision-making skills or short-term thinking.
- stephp 13y agoRight? Are they purposely trying to come off like a Disney villain? Absolutely everything they do is ruthless and aggressive. If you sign up for an account now, they email everyone you know. It just happens; even if you try to avoid it. Then they ask for a second email address.. you know, in case the first.. goes inactive suddenly? People fall for that, thinking LinkedIn is legit enough to be trustworthy. I deleted my account forever ago, but I get emails constantly saying so-and-so wants to connect with me. After the first 3-5, I looked into it. Nope-- no one's trying to contact me through LinkedIn at all. Just LinkedIn doing its thing.
- tedunangst 13y agoyou know, in case the first.. goes inactive suddenly? Yes, exactly. In case you signed up using your work email, like practically everybody does, and then one day find yourself not working where you used to work.
- Zimahl 13y agoIn case you signed up using your work email, like practically everybody does 1) Why would anyone use a temporary email to sign up to a social service? 2) Why would anyone use their work email for a job networking social site knowing full well that work emails are not private?
- tedunangst 13y agoBecause your invitation came from a coworker who used, you guessed it, your work email.
- Angostura 13y agoThere are a lot of people who use their work e-mails with LinkedIn because LinkedIn provides a useful adjunct to their actual work. A company that I used to work for, for example had a link to each person's LinkedIn profile on their biography page. The testimonials they received on LinkedIn were worth rather more than the ones that might be put up ib the business' own site.
- chc 13y agoGetting away with what? Can you tell me what they should have done to offer the same end-user functionality in a way that would not seem "sleazy" to you?
- orenmazor 13y agoseriously? this is what Intro is? how is it not a bigger deal?people get upset over the littlest Facebook changes, but something this big barely shows up?
- viraptor 13y agoProbably because you have to explicitly enable this. With Facebook changes you don't get the choice.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoGood thing I use gmail.
- drp4929 13y agoGood for you. Google Tells Court You Cannot Expect Privacy When Sending Messages to Gmail http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/google-tells-court-you-cannot-expect-privacy-when-sending-messages-gmail-people-who-care http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/google-tells-cou...
- pavel_lishin 13y agoI was being ironic.
- dudus 13y agoThis is incorrect. Completely out of context and actually quite the opposite to what happened. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130814/14262524177/ http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130814/14262524177/
- ctide 13y agoWhat's the difference between this and using an app such as Mailbox?
- tedunangst 13y agoIntro doesn't have a waiting list.
- uptown 13y agoAsked the same question, but nobody answered. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601179
- ctide 13y agoI mean, Mailbox literally does the same thing (editing your messages on their backend -- http://www.mailboxapp.com/blog/?p=1#javascript-now-filtered-from-mailbox-messages http://www.mailboxapp.com/blog/?p=1#javascript-now-filtered-...) and no one cares. LinkedIn does it and the Internet goes shit crazy.
- mey 13y agoI have never heard of Mailbox before, but I have heard of LinkedIn.
- miguelrochefort 13y ago
- etchalon 13y agoThis is ridiculous. LinkedIn is offering a feature, optionally, to users who chose to install it. They have been upfront about how it works. If you don't like how it works, don't use it. Problem solved, myopic holier-than-thou rant avoided.
- hdevalence 13y agoDo you honestly believe that most users who will install this will fully understand the ramifications of that choice? if yes, why do you think that, in spite of all the evidence that most users are clueless about security? If no, then in what sense are they really giving consent, if that consent is not informed?
- miguelrochefort 13y agoMaybe we should also ban junk food. I mean, I'm sure many people don't "fully understand the ramifications of that choice".
- Anderkent 13y agoAre you really saying people don't understand junk food is unhealthy to the same degree they don't understand IT?
- miguelrochefort 13y agoThe idea is to be consistent, not please the majority. I can't say if people's understanding of how junk food is bad for them is greater than their understanding of internet security, but I wouldn't say that they're fundamentally different things. My point is that "what people understand" is not universal, and is highly subjective. We can't assume that everybody understand why alcohol, smoking, junk food, lack of physical activity, medecine, etc. are potentially "bad" for them. Yet, we don't ban most of these things "in case some people don't understand"? We teach people about health and nutrition, why shouldn't we do the same about IT (I mean, it's such a huge part of our lives now that we can't ignore it)? Too many people jump on the "prohibition" train, when it's rarely the best solution. Rather than limit what companies can do (it's rarely objectively bad, they're offering users a feature in exchange for a subjective downside. I would focus on teaching people, not limit what can be done. But maybe that's just me.
- edwintorok 13y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600597
- shenoybr 13y agoI wonder how this affect BYOD to work. Corporations would be furious to have their email content scanned by linkedin.
- natekh 13y agoI'm not saying 1 bad turn deserves another, but this is no worse than what any company operating at scale does when they serve https through a gateway service (Scrubbers, CDN, whatever).
- webhat 13y agoNicely stated, what I didn't see mentioned was the iframe it introduces into the mail. It can use this iframe to collect all kinds of additional data about you. In the first instance I thought this was an app that was running in the background on your phone, I would have called that doing the impossible. This is just a MITM, and not a very good one at that.
- kevinpet 13y agoI wonder if they called it "intro" to make it impossible to google for so that no one can ever figure out what they're agreeing to when they install it. What does the sig it appends look like? I will have to make sure to never send email to anyone who has the tell-tale "I opt into spyware" flag.
- lispm 13y agoTo celebrate this, I removed LinkedIn apps from my devices.
- miguelrochefort 13y agoDo you expect some kind of reward? Sheep of the year maybe?
- astrange 13y agoThere's no need to be mean to people doing something you agree with.
- miguelrochefort 13y agoWhether I agree or not is not the point. It was a "me too" comment, and I made sure to point it out. Could I have done a better job at it? Probably.
- frewsxcv 13y agoWhy not just delete your account as well? I deleted mine a year ago and I have no reason to look back
- dclowd9901 13y ago> 1. Attorney-client privilege. Really? I guess you better have your own SMTP server set up then, or hope your email provider is willing to go to bat for your rights... > 8. If I were the NSA… Yeah, it sounds like they definitely have needed it so far... 5 other of the things are basically the same point, remade in 5 different ways. This is a really weak list. There are certainly concerns, but most of these problems are symptomatic of our email system as it is. And have we all forgotten how crazy everyone went when we found out google was going to start advertising in Gmail?
- andrewfong 13y agoIncidentally, many lawyers and law firms run their own mail servers for precisely this reason.
- tedunangst 13y agoI think there's more to it than that. They want audit trails and backups, they don't want you reading email from unapproved devices, etc.
- andrewfong 13y agoYes, but it's a part. When I was a law student, confidentiality was named as the main reason why we weren't allowed to use Gmail for legal clinic work. If you just want audit trails and backups, there are other ways of accomplishing that don't involve outright banning use of a third party mail service.
- DannyBee 13y ago"why we weren't allowed to use Gmail for legal clinic work." Since that time (I assume this was a while ago, i can't imagine it was recent since most of these schools now use hosted email providers), almost every single state has issued opinions stating that storing email with a cloud provider does not break privilege. AFAIK nobody has cared much since New York's ethics opinion in 2008.
- sneak 13y agoGiving away email credentials to a third party service, regardless of reason, should be both covered in your internal training materials, as well as be maintained as a firing offense. This is really just a case of well-branded spearphishing. You should already be protecting against that.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> This is really just a case of well-branded spearphishing. Spearphishing is distinguished from phishing more generally by having very narrow, specific target selection. If we are going to look for a analogies to techniques of catching fish, this is more weir phishing than spearphishing.
- scott_karana 13y agoIt's more subtle than that, since the "Intro" iOS profile simply sets up a proxy. This would take about three clicks from an end-user, and at no point do they knowingly disclose their passwords...
- joe_the_user 13y agoThis is really just a case of well-branded spearphishing. You should already be protecting against that. Well really, it's somewhere between generic phishing and tightly targeted (spear) phishing. But the thing you have to remember about "phishing", about "spear phishing", about "social engineering" and about the cons that con-artists have been pulling since before computers existed is you are never just protected from this since every social con is based on exploiting a reflexive, habitual response and the con-artist will always find those no matter how people are simply trained (indeed, the more robot-like you make people's reactions, the more reflexes the con-artist has to work with). So basically, any serious organization has to keep on top of the new threats coming. Every organization has to warn it's people not to do what they already ought to know better than to do. Eternal vigilance... Reminds me of something else.
- jmadsen 13y agoAre Linkedin still working out of Mom's garage? Do they not have a single person on staff capable of looking at the current environment regarding internet privacy and say, "Uh, guys...maybe put this one on ice for a year..?"
- brymaster 13y agoYeah one would hope these guys had some kind of ethical compass but history of Big Data (Google, FB, ad networks and their ilk) shows otherwise. Everyone in "social" just wants their Fuck You Money and "fuck users" because they're the product. Apathy and subversion of the web from the big players or anyone with a Facebook Jr biz is why the surveillance state exists. "Silicon" Valley is working on spy tools and innovative ways to get more people to click ads.
- lambda 13y agoRemember, LinkedIn has grown so much in part because so many people are willing to hand over their email passwords so LinkedIn can take a look at their contacts. LinkedIn knows exactly how many people will hand over full control of their email if it means that they have a better chance of finding a better job.
- jmadsen 13y agoThink I have to agree with you on that. Despite all the umbrage from HN, etc crowd, they prolly know it isn't really hurting them & the financial rewards are great. Just doesn't seem like the greatest marketing strategy at the moment :-)
- csense 13y ago> Do they not have a single person on staff capable of looking at the current environment regarding internet privacy and say, "Uh, guys...maybe put this one on ice for a year..?" They probably do. And that guy probably got overruled by another guy who said, "Forget that naysayer and instead think about how much more aggressively we can market ourselves and how much more money we can make..."
- mcenedella 13y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6430893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6430893 "LinkedIn Founder says 'all of these privacy concerns tend to be old people issues.'" The bit about privacy starts at the 13 minute mark.
- tonylemesmer 13y agoSo make a plugin for your email client which raises a little Intro flag when you receive an email from an Intro user.
- ig1 13y agoWell lets take these one-by-one: ------------- 1. Attorney-client privilege. I'm guessing most law firms use third party email servers, anti-virus, anti-spam and archive/audit systems which this would also apply to. It would also apply if you're using Raportive, Xobni or the like (or integrated time-tracking, billing, crm, etc.). ------------- 2. By default, LinkedIn changes the content of your emails. Irrelevant. Unless you read your emails in plain text every modern email client changes how email is displayed. ------------- 3. Intro breaks secure email. Yes. Except iOS mail doesn't support crypto signatures anyway. ------------- 4. LinkedIn got owned. Yes. LinkedIn adds an extra point of vulnerability. ------------- 5. LinkedIn is storing your email communications. Well metatdata but yes. ------------- 7. It’s probably a gross violation of your company’s security policy. Yes. As is using Linkedin itself. Or Dropbox. Or Github. Or Evernote. Or Chrome. Or any enterprise software that uses the bottom up approach. ------------- 8. If I were the NSA… The NSA has access to your emails if they want them anyway. Email isn't a secure protocol against a well funded adversary. ------------- 9. It’s not what they say, but what they don’t say This looks like a semantic dispute, but it doesn't look any more vague than say Google's privacy policy. Companies in certain circumstances are legally required to provide access to information. ------------- 10. Too many secrets These all seem to be questions that can either be answered by testing or ones that LinkedIn would probably be happy to disclose, but unlikely to be major issues to mainstream users. ------------- So fundamentally it comes down to two points, granting Linkedin access to your email creates a new point of attack and Linkedin themselves might use your email in ways you find undesirable. So it's essentially a trade-off for the benefits you get from the app versus those risks. For a personal account which you use for private emails, personal banking, etc. the evaluation is obviously going to be very much different from say a salesperson's work account which they use for managing communication with leads. In the later case they may already be trusting LinkedIn with similar confidential information and already use multiple services (analytics, crm, etc.) that hook into their email so the additional relative risk might be smaller. As people with technical expertise we shouldn't use scare-mongering to push our personal viewpoints upon those with less expertise, but rather help people understand the security/benefit trade-offs that they're making so they can decide for themselves whether to take those risks. It's important to treat the wider non-technical community with respect and as adults capable of making their own judgements and not as kids who need to be scared into safety.
- buro9 13y agoOne of the other subtle things they do with metadata is their fascination with IP addresses. Intro will enable LinkedIn to have the IP address of all of your staff using it, and thus (from corp Wifi, home locations of staff, popular places your staff go) they will know which IP addresses relate to your staff members (or you individually if you are the only person on a given IP). This means that even without logging onto LinkedIn, if you view a page on their site they can then create that "so and so viewed your profile", which is what they're selling to other users as the upgrade package to LinkedIn. Worse than that, as a company you can pay to have LinkedIn data available when you process your log files, and from that you know which companies viewed your site. And that isn't based on vague ideas of which IPs belong to a company according to public registrar info, this is quality data as the people who visited from an IP told LinkedIn who they were. Think of that when you're doing competitor analysis, or involved in any legal case and researching the web site of the other party. And VPNs won't help you here, as you'd still be strongly identified on your device and leaking your IP address all the time. There are so many reasons why this LinkedIn feature needs to die a very visible and public death, and very few about why it should survive. It's a neat hack for sure, but then so were most pop-up and pop-under adverts and the neatness of overcoming the "impossible" is no reason this should survive.
- ig1 13y agofyi most of the major marketing automation platforms already let you do this. They're based upon a peer-to-peer exchange of lead information (i.e you identify yourself to one site and they'll sell that information to other sites in exchange for identifying information about other users), hence it's already far more accurate than public registrar information.
- buro9 13y agoHey Imran (chatted to you in IRC a few times), I do realise that lead information is sold, and I've had enough offers to sell my own users (which I've declined) to realise just how prevalent the practise is. LinkedIn sell a fairly complete business dataset. My point is that a lot of people might imagine they could do this, but probably don't really believe that they are doing this. Then when you add in Intro's almost constant tracking (vs occasionally accessing one of the sites that sells your data - or LinkedIn on the web) it is easy to see just how complete one would be making that dataset. I'd say that most people don't really understand believe that this happens and how good (if that's the word) that dataset already is.
- iamleppert 13y agoIn other news, e-mail is an insecure protocol and most people transmit in the clear and don't have their own e-mail infrastructure anyway. It's interesting this "blog post" came from a professional security company who makes it money from scaring individuals and companies about security threats. Is it just me, or is this firm even worse than LinkedIn?
- llamataboot 13y agoI desperately want to delete LinkedIn, but I am also looking for my first developer jobs in the tech field. In my former field, no one would ever ask for your LI profile. You send a resume, link to a resume, whatever. In the tech field, every single company I've interviewed with so far has looked at my linkedin profile before our interview and specifically requested it. Until the field changes, or I have a stronger status as a developer, I feel I have to be there or get overlooked for someone who is there.
- damian2000 13y agoIf an employer is worth any salt they should be placing a higher value on your StackOverflow account, Github account and/or personal site (with resume). I don't see any value in LinkedIn - to me its still just a glorified resume site (and one without any verification - many people make stuff up).
- foxylad 13y agoTurn this to your advantage. I'd be more impressed by a reasoned explanation of why you aren't on LinkedIn than any puffery you might have on your page.
- anaphor 13y agoSimply tell them you don't use it because of ethical reasons, and explain why if asked. If you would like a replacement then check out http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ (requires a certain amount of SO rep or an invite, which I would be willing to give but I see no way of doing that with you).
- tzury 13y agoI wonder how's Rapportive doing this days. That is, whether this plug-in seats in people's GMail app and sends out data to LinkedIn or not. After all, we are talking about the same team more or less, and surely the same company who owns Rapportive today. If my concerns are real. One might find this is ironic that Rapportive was backed by YC and Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, and now this very company violating GMail users' privacy.
- JeremyBanks 13y agoYikes. I've still been using Rapportive, but learning that it's being adapted into this monstrosity has instantly dissolved any trust I had for the product. Removing it now.
- cognivore 13y agoThe thing that I find interesting is if LinkedIn goes ahead and does this, how many other companies will want to join the bandwagon and then we'll end up with our email being bounced around through a slew of different proxies so everyone can add their spam and ads to it.
- anaphor 13y agoAnd with each one trying to remove the content produced by the others in some "clever" way.
- gohrt 13y agoIs this claim true? I thought the Feds were claiming that using any hosted email (Gmail, Hotmail, etc), is considered a 3rd party subject to subpoena. > These communications are generally legally privileged and can’t be used as evidence in court – but only if you keep the messages confidential.
- coldcode 13y agoHmm if enough people complain Apple might close this feature. At least it's opt-in. As for me, I would say no.
- sytelus 13y agoI'm still not able to believe if I read that right. Does LinkedIn really re-routes your emails to their servers in their entirety? I looked at their announcement and video at http://blog.linkedin.com/2013/10/23/announcing-linkedin-intro/ http://blog.linkedin.com/2013/10/23/announcing-linkedin-intr.... There is NOT even a hint of disclosure that they are doing this. I can imagine 10 ways to achieve the similar user experience without re-routing entire emails. So if this is true, LinkedIn really really fundamentally screwed up with customer trust.
- martinbc 13y agoSeems like Linkedin have posted an update on http://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing-impossible-ios http://engineering.linkedin.com/mobile/linkedin-intro-doing-...: Update, 10/24/13 We wanted to provide additional information about how LinkedIn Intro works, so that we can address some of the questions that have been raised. There are some points that we want to reinforce in order to make sure members understand how this product works: - You have to opt-in and install Intro before you see LinkedIn profiles in any email. - Usernames, passwords, OAuth tokens, and email contents are not permanently stored anywhere inside LinkedIn data centers. Instead, these are stored on your iPhone. - Once you install Intro, a new Mail account is created on your iPhone. Only the email in this new Intro Mail account goes via LinkedIn; other Mail accounts are not affected in any way. - All communication from the Mail app to the LinkedIn Intro servers is fully encrypted. Likewise, all communication from the LinkedIn Intro servers to your email provider (e.g. Gmail or Yahoo! Mail) is fully encrypted. - Your emails are only accessed when the Mail app is retrieving emails from your email provider. LinkedIn servers automatically look up the "From" email address, so that Intro can then be inserted into the email.
- ninjazee124 13y agoI just can't fathom how something so ridiculous could pass so many engineers at LinkedIn, without raising flags on how bad this is. The moment I saw the word "proxy" I cringed!
- siculars 13y agoThis idea is such a disaster I don't even know how it was allowed to see the light of day. The sad fact is that there are untold numbers of people who will install this monstrosity. Serious questions though, if you are an IT shop - how do you defend against this trojan horse app?
- jzwinck 13y agoMaybe you can scan email coming into your corporate accounts, looking for LinkedIn SMTP servers in the headers? It may then be straightforward to find out (after the fact) if your users are using this service. Aside: as Raymond Chen often asks, "What if two companies did this?" Can you layer this service with a hypothetical similar one from Facebook? If not, it seems like a huge first-mover advantage.
- siculars 13y agoRight, first mover. I'm afraid LinkedIn has selfishly crossed a line that we will all suffer for. Other companies will no doubt try to do similarly idiotic things in the name of "convenience", "features", etc.
- foxylad 13y ago> Intro breaks secure mail. If it's modifying the message, it likely breaks DKIM too. meaning your messages will be more likely to be flagged as spam. More generally, this is the catalyst for me leaving LinkedIn. They've never generated any new business (not even a single lead), and if I'm honest the only reason I use it is more about my ego than anything useful.
- foxylad 13y agoOpportunity time... are there any more scrupulous alternatives to LinkedIn?
- codecrusade 13y agoShocking how something like this came out of Linkedin and Apple has not booted them from the App store yet?
- hajderr 13y agoThe idea itself is not that compelling that I would install it even if it fulfilled all the criteria of security.
- scotty79 13y agoThat shows that no engineer has any say in what linkedin does. I can't imagine any tech security aware individual would take such responsibility upon himself. How did the C-people even found out such thing is possible? Some intern who just found out how mail works probably was flapping his jaw too much.