LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

I wish that LinkedIn had the ability to disable your profile.<p>I&#x27;m not looking for a job, I&#x27;m not looking to connect with recruiters, and I really don&#x27;t like the ability for one of my exes to publicly see where I&#x27;m working so that she can continue to harass me -- on the other hand, My LinkedIn Profile is around eight or nine years old at this point in time, and I&#x27;ve amassed a fair amount of connections, that I&#x27;d like to keep should I need to start looking for a job anytime soon. I wish that I could disable it, hiding it from search engines, recruiters, and anyone else who&#x27;s looking for it, until I&#x27;m ready to start looking for a job without deleting every one of my connections and starting over.

I had an interesting experience last year when I was working in a co-working space. I noticed that LinkedIn started suggesting to me the other people who were working in the same space. I had no verbal or virtual contact with these people, other than basic office small talk, but I never knew their name and they never knew mine. I mentioned it to them, and they all claimed they hadn&#x27;t looked me up on LinkedIn, and that that was very weird. My assumption was that LinkedIn knew we were sharing the same internet connection and so they linked us together.

The only thing I find linkedin useful for these days is to keep an eye on open positions related to my field. Besides, I dont know anyone that uses LinkedIn and actually likes it. Lets face it, its completely horrible for many reasons:<p>- Recruiters sending unsolicited connections requests and spam,<p>- Lame articles on productivity ( &quot;5 reasons you should do X&quot;, or &quot;5 things billionaires do when Y&quot; bla bla.)<p>- Who viewed your profile feature - seriously, things like this make people not click on other people&#x27;s profile.<p>- All kinds of statistics on profile views that don&#x27;t really mean anything of value.<p>- Thousands of collaboration groups that are completely inactive, so basically no community whatsoever.<p>I honestly think that the only reason they are still in business is because nobody came up with a superior product yet, and that makes me sad.

&gt; I don’t currently and haven’t previously used the Imported Contact feature<p>But perhaps the others did? If &#x27;Steve Jacobs&#x27; imported <i>his</i> contacts and you exchanged emails with him, LinkedIn apparently becomes aware of that relationship. In fact:<p>&gt; Tami has a total of 5 connections, lives in Seattle, no public company or title listed, but we just happened to exchange a few emails a couple days prior regarding some questions I had about software her company sold.<p>Tami probably used the imported contacts feature here, and that&#x27;s how LinkedIn would know.

Other users who have imported their contact list is probably what causes them to show up on &quot;People You May Know&quot;. I have noticed that people who I&#x27;m suggested to add are ones that I have only communicated with through email.

If it&#x27;s creepy it should just illustrate that it&#x27;s not too difficult to make these sorts of connections based on address books and activity both on linkedin and on other sites that cooperate with linkedin.<p>What you do online is in most cases not very private. Act accordingly.

Creepy experience from this week. We have hired someone for daycare, I only have exchanged a few mail with that person. And now, her husband is in &quot;people I know&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has, and since we are both in her contact list, Linkedin assumed we know each other. It is somewhat correct but creepy nonetheless.<p>I am not going to add him but from my point of view, proposing you to add people you only know remotely diminishes the usefulness of the network. How can you trust the relation&#x2F;recommendation&#x2F;etc if you are connected to your second cousin&#x27;s neighbor ?

Just a few more bits of creepiness that have happened since I wrote this article a couple years ago:<p>- My wife signed up for LinkedIn years ago with her work email but never added any connections. She got an email to her personal email address from LinkedIn saying &quot;David Veldt is inviting you to join LinkedIn!&quot; I have no permissions that I could find set to allow such a thing.<p>- Just in the past week, two people have requested to connect with me that I haven&#x27;t seen in over 10 years and live a couple states away from. Our only &quot;connection&quot; is that we&#x27;re Facebook friends. There&#x27;s no way I&#x27;m in their contacts list. I find it highly unlikely that they&#x27;ve searched or viewed my profile because we have absolutely nothing in common.<p>- The thing lately that pisses me off the most is how much they&#x27;re trying to get me to mindlessly give them access to my contact list. On the app, sometimes a screen pops up when I open it to &quot;Find more connections&quot; but turns out they want authorization for my address book. Same thing on the notifications; they show a notification in the connections icon which usually indicates someone wants to connect, but instead its just a generic &quot;hey, we can find you more of these!&quot; type of notification. Reminds me of the cartoons where the salesman keeps popping up from laundry hampers and behind trees.<p>Might be time for a follow-up article.

Does anyone else think that LinkedIn should spend less time being creepy and more time fixing it&#x27;s basic features? Half the time the site takes forever to load, the filtering features rarely work and the search is so bad. I don&#x27;t know how a site that has been around for this long still has so many issues with basic features.

It may be the creepiest social network, but it is also the only network where I can be endorsed for skills I&#x27;ve forgotten I had by people I&#x27;ve forgotten I worked with.

I completely grok this discussion. Let me add a different perspective.<p>I work in a remote office with a very small number of keep-to-themselves colleagues. It&#x27;s very common to arrive, spend 9 hours working, and leave for home w&#x2F;o any dialogue other than a polite &quot;how&#x27;s it going?&quot;. In other words the place is dead.<p>The sales force is scattered around the world &amp; doesn&#x27;t need a lot of hand-holding. Our marketplace is a relative backwater, so there&#x27;s not a lot &quot;churn&quot; to keep things interesting. (I&#x27;m a product guy. Interaction is like breathing.)<p>The bottom line is that I find myself with a lot spare time to explore &amp; learn. My first choices are HN &amp; Feedly, but I do enjoy finding colleagues from prior jobs - and the occasional high school &#x2F; college friend - on LI. It definitely serves a remote-networking purpose for me.

<i>LinkedIn has experienced substantial growth in recent years, but they seem to be overstepping their bounds in certain areas.</i><p>I&#x27;d argue that they&#x27;ve experienced substantial growth precisely <i>because</i> they overstep their bounds. They&#x27;re actively rewarded for engaging in this kind of behavior, and they rarely (if ever) face any real consequences when they take it too far. And despite the occasional angry blog post, it will continue until there&#x27;s some sort of mass exodus of users—and even that would most likely be brought on by simple network effects rather than any sort of collective concern for privacy.

It&#x27;s creepy but its also cool from an engineering perspective. Statistically we can draw fairly accurate conclusions merely based on the actions of the people around us. LinkedIn is just taking the data approach to how someones face looks when someone they know walks into the room. -_-

This link is now redirecting to an odd mix of the intended link + the wp install url<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interactually.com&#x2F;linkedin-creepiest-social-network&#x2F;wp-admin&#x2F;install.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interactually.com&#x2F;linkedin-creepiest-social-netwo...</a>

The author pointed out that there is an additional Privacy Controls section in Groups, Companies &amp; Applications as well as under Profile. However, there is yet another Privacy Controls section under Account.<p><pre><code> LinkedIn may use cookies and similar technologies on third party sites to understand my browsing interests and target ads and personalize services accordingly. </code></pre> If you&#x27;re going to have a &quot;Privacy Controls&quot; section, then please do not be creepy and spread such controls through three separate sections.

Title needs [2013] appended, as it&#x27;s from May 9, 2013.<p>Original HN thread:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5680680" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5680680</a>

&gt; <i>David Veldt is a digital marketing consultant specializing in building online businesses and growing brands. He writes on a variety of topics within SEO, PPC and analytics, as well as the occasional ode to baseball.</i><p>This is an amazing conclusion coming from a digital marketing consultant who&#x27;s livelihood is based on the very principles that he&#x27;s challenging. This is akin to a car salesman not realizing that many of the parts of the &quot;American car&quot; he&#x27;s selling are probably not made in America.

I don&#x27;t like how I still show up on linkedin to other people in spite of the fact that I deleted my account (to the best of anyone&#x27;s ability) years ago.

LinkedIn&#x27;s social graph is much more valuable to the company, if the graph captures only real offline connections. A fully connected network graph offers no information insights. As time goes on and LinkedIn&#x27;s social graph becomes polluted with spurious connections this will devalue the company. They need more quality control around this, not more sharsee.

I had a similar experience with the suggested name of a family member that was pretty unusual. It had her working for a different company than the one she works for. I actually asked her some months later whether she was enjoying her new job, and sue looked at me completely blankly. I have no idea hoe they extrapolate these false positives.

Deleted my LinkedIn account about a year ago. I&#x27;m yet to suffer a single negative consequence from it.

Is LinkedIn even a social network? Everyone I know uses it as basically a resume hosting site. I don&#x27;t know of anyone who uses it for actually doing anything &#x27;social&#x27; - just career related things.

I remember reading an article a while back (can&#x27;t find it at the moment) that LinkedIn imported iPhone users contact lists without consent similar to what Path did but much earlier.

What makes it creepy to me is that it is an Experian company.

I wrote this blog post almost two years ago. Incredibly disappointed that the problem has only gotten worse and no questions have been answered.

They&#x27;re just suggesting people who&#x27;ve looked at your profile.<p>Your friends looked you up on LinkedIn.

Is it at all possible that they have deals with hosted email providers?

It&#x27;s actually a pretty ugly site. You&#x27;d think for a site that popular they&#x27;d hire better designers.

My creepiest experience on LI: my six year old niece is a recommended connection.

One time I sent an email to a random celebrity, and literally a few minutes later he showed up in my &#x27;you may know..&#x27; list. I became convinced at that point that LI is sniffing SMTP headers at peering points. I don&#x27;t know how you would cut that deal, but if Google has their CDN everywhere, there&#x27;s precedent.