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New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

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Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#101

Post by streamofdigits »

dannyw wrote: post #84
streamofdigits wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you look at the sample image there are data points like "inferred salaries", "inferred years of experience", number of connections (and possibly other stuff) that somebody may or may not have wanted to advertise to the universe. the leaking of semi-public data (over which we may have some control) alongside "inferred bits" and behavioral data (over which we don't) and combined with other legally or illegally obtai…

What do you think is a good solution to this problem?

there are many ways to skin this cat if one was motivated enough to put their mind to it... but some suggestions anyway:

never have 700M profiles in one place. decentralization by default - large scale centralization only when absolutely needed and with rigorous controls as a public (or highly regulated) good.

never create portable / tradeable behavioral profiles that can be linked to individuals. what can happen will happen and is happening.

never offer trivial free services in exchange for significant private data. establish a respectful and healthy client/user relation without hidden third parties in the loop

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#102

Post by ricardo81 »

Zenst wrote: post #100
ricardo81 wrote: post #63

Not surprising really. A few years back Hotmail/Outlook were returning people's Twitter/LinkedIn handles for emails sent/received. It had been noticed you could scrape that fairly easily at scale. With one email account you could check up to 30000 email addresses before being flagged by Outlook. Slightly longer ago you could simply iterate 1...n on LinkedIn URLs to find someone's profile, by converting the number to…

> Also their bulk contact upload. Take any data leak of email addresses, bulk upload them as contacts and then correlate email addresses to social profiles. This is one of those functionality aspects all these social/networking sites fall foul of one way or another, be email or phone number relational suggestions. That and the aspect of this scraping of phone numbers or emails - even with the users permission, kinda…

Agreed. One of the poorer aspects of those 'functionalities' is friends of friends details get added, i.e. sharing your phone contacts or email contacts. There's people not on those networks that have a definite amount of information about them on there anyway.

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#103

Post by dylan604 »

chrisjc wrote: post #88
specialist wrote: post #45

FWIW, I've been scrubbing my social profiles. LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook, etc. Barest of bones. Removing all connections, photos, posts, personal details. (I know the damage is already done. The aggregators never really delete anything.) Why not just out right delete my profiles? I'm squatting. To ensure they're not used as socket puppets. After a beloved coworker passed, their profile got highjacked. Ten years later,…

Same, but also adding a lot of fake data. Then again, they're probably smart enough to figure out what is real.

But if you made it a thing to daily post fake things so that the activity looks normal, can you eventually convice the social overlords you are someone else?

Relocate yourself to another city/state/country in your profile. Daily make posts about things occurring in that new location. Make those posts in sync with local time. Of course using a VPN endpoint that correlates.

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#104

Post by dylan604 »

emodendroket wrote: post #10
stuff4ben wrote: post #9

But is this really a problem? LinkedIn is "advertising for yourself", presumably to get a job. With the exception of my phone number, I'm ok with the world knowing this information about me. It's the equivalent of a phone book and I'm putting myself out there and advertising myself in the hopes of getting a job.

My thoughts exactly. Given the nature of LinkedIn there is absolutely nothing I'd put there that I didn't want others to see.

Isn't the revealing thing about these leaks not the data that you provided but the data they have associated to you from other means?

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#105

Post by calotow »

Santosh83 wrote: post #70

If I put on my thickest tinfoil hat, I might even think these continuous data leaks are deliberately happening to get users/consumers normalised towards expecting zero privacy or corporate accountability going forward.

By including a description of your supposed hat, you kind of pre-negate the content of your post.

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#107

Post by nzealand »

This hack includes inferred salary, facebook username, mobile number, geo location...

None of this is publicly available.

None of this can even be downloaded by myself when I get a copy of all my data from linkedin...

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/50191/download...

So I have no idea what information about myself was leaked in this hack

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#108

Post by martinkraft »

stuff4ben wrote: post #81
martinkraft wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s good to hear that it hasn’t affected you personally, but the severity of the leak must be assessed based on the privacy that was reasonably expected by users. LinkedIn has not met their duty to protect their personal information and that alone is enough to say: yes, it’s a problem.

Yeah I agree that LI hasn't done a great job of protecting their data from being misused. But that's the nature of social networks though, data is to be shared in order to build the network. As another commenter said, just don't put in anything you don't want people to find out. Absolute privacy cannot be achieved when you give out your information willingly. To paraphrase WOPR, "the only way to win the game is to no…

What about your job hunt status, openings you've applied to, DMs?

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#109

Post by emodendroket »

rightbyte wrote: post #97
eythian wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and still we hand it to strangers to run off with for 3 minutes like nothing. Why would you do that?

I'm joking about the restaurant experience. Nowadays the staff usually comes out with a portable machine though.

I saw that in Canada but it's rare in the US.

Re: New LinkedIn Data Leak Leaves 700M Users Exposed

#110

Post by nojito »

nzealand wrote: post #107

This hack includes inferred salary, facebook username, mobile number, geo location... None of this is publicly available. None of this can even be downloaded by myself when I get a copy of all my data from linkedin... https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/50191/download... So I have no idea what information about myself was leaked in this hack

Inferred salary is from salary estimates based on job titles. It isn’t tied to your personal data IIRC.

It’s likely that an API endpoint was found and all the data was siphoned off.

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