Ugh definitely. The awful thing is that they harvest your email from someone's address book and then bombard you with "people you may know" on your actual legitimate Linkedin account(tied into that email).<p>LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't imagine any legitimate "superstars" actually respond to these folks.<p>Edit: the really awkward thing is when it starts recommending you one night stands from years ago just because you may have at some point exchanged an email.
LinkedIn is a classic example of how a company must shift from serving their customer to serving their investors after they go public.<p>They used to be a very useful service.[1] But the closer they got to their IPO the more the started doing things that were clearly in the best interest of generating more page views regardless of how valuable those things were to their users. To my mind this lawsuit was brought about because of that very behavior.<p>1: Not accounting for the recruiters who have plagued it. Something LinkedIn could probably deal with but they don't want to because that would affect page views.
Hope that LinkedIn lose that suit. I had tonnes of people with me in their address book bombarding me with LinkedIn invitations - it'd make me feel better about that.
My favorite LinkedIn feature is how invitations are not sent by linkedin.com, but your friend/colleague/etc. This way, marking it as spam doesn't hurt them.<p>I had to go through several rounds of customer support to get my information off of their site. "You don't have an account" they would repeat - of course I don't, which is why it bothers me that I still get invitations and show up in your "recommended" lists.<p>Not to mention the fake endorsements.
<i>While Koh agreed to throw out claims based on federal wiretap and stored communications claims, she said LinkedIn may have violated California’s right of publicity, which protects against the appropriation of someone’s name or likeness, without their consent, for commercial purposes.</i>
From the article I understand the suit is by LinkedIn members whose contact book was (in their opinion) abused to send these invitation emails to non-members. On the face of it that's a reasonable claim and seems they should prevail.<p>But also: How about the recipients -- who are getting repeated unsolicited commercial emails? How does this activity not violate CAN-SPAM? Shouldn't LinkedIn be subject to fines?<p>Edit: Although I don't terribly mind the downvote, especially if it was accidental -- I did read the whole article and had a genuine question.
I logged into Linkedin recently for the first time in a while, and I was APPALLED to find that they had suggested the psychiatrist I saw during college for depression as a contact. They must have mined out her contacts info. This stuff is extremely sensitive and should be confidential, but Linkedin totally disregards that.
For anyone talking about receiving too much LinkedIn spam it was revealed to me on HN that they actually have a do not contact list. I sent them an email listing off my email addresses a little while ago and they've honoured it.<p><a href="https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426/" rel="nofollow">https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426/</a>
Linked-In used to put up a message wanting to "verify" my email address and ask for a password. I made it a point to never ever give them my email password because I thought they'd help themselves. Anyone know if they do? I also gave my linked-in account it's own password in case they might try do something crappy like trying to get at my email assuming its the same password. It's not just them, half the apps on Google Play want access to my contacts, texts, and/or location - stuff the app itself has no use for.
LinkedIn is the worst offender when it comes to SPAM. I've turned off all possible settings to recive 0 emails still get multiple messages everyday :(
I'd appreciate if they let me unsubscribe from their damn emails on a catch all account where I get a former employee's emails. They make you log-in to opt out and I'm not about to reset the guy's password in case he still uses linkedin.
I used to be on LinkedIn, but deleted my profile a year and half ago. I still get e-mails about invitations from people who know me, and whenever I choose to unsubscribe from them, I still get them.<p>The scary thing is that when you click through the link to confirm, they used to ask you to 'change a password' implying that a ghost account in your name already exists. I just checked it now, and it just offers me to create an account instead.
I don't know how many times I've accidentally sent emails to random people asking them to join LinkedIn because the button looks like the one for connecting with someone already on the site, two different things.