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LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

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Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably just name, location, and interest matching. Especially if you have a fairly uncommon name.

It's using a different name; I don't think I have a location set; and the only similar interest would be League of Legends, since I created the account initially just to get the free promo. The only thing I can think of is that it's matching IP addresses and concluding my two accounts are the same account.

Even when you log out of Facebook, it keeps some cookies around.It could be more than just IP address.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#82

Yes, I also noted the creepiness of "viewers of the profile also viewed." https://twitter.com/joelandren/status/251417778643406848 If I were a woman, I would be turned off to see something like this.

I'm not sure how much one should read into that. I mean, ok, there are probably some guys (and some women, as far as that goes) who click on profiles solely due to the attractiveness of the picture. BUT... there are other reasonable reasons to explain a picture like shown above. For example, note that all of the people listed appear to work in related domains (marketing, event management of some sort). Given the natu…

Recruiters and event planners are mostly attractive women, for obvious reasons. So I'm not sure what the above post really signifies...

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#83

Y'all know that I worked for Google. On this topic, I can only say good things about the place. When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard. Many of these "social" innovations that are popping up on the market place were rejected out-of-hand at Google because it holds itself to an extremely high ethical standard regarding user data, as it actually respects them. I was shocked,…

> When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard.

With all due respect, but you've gotta joking.

Google doesn't even hold itself to the standards set by the laws in countries it operates in. Laws that are for now still full of loopholes Google happily exploits with zero restraint, despite knowing full well (not in the last place because they've been warned on a regular basis) that this at the very least violates the intent of those privacy laws.

Also, Google has been actively lobbying against privacy protection laws in the EU for several years now.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#84

Yes, I also noted the creepiness of "viewers of the profile also viewed." https://twitter.com/joelandren/status/251417778643406848 If I were a woman, I would be turned off to see something like this.

All of those people appear to be in the Washington DC area. It is possible they are all in the same social circle in which case, it would make complete sense they would all be viewed as a group.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#85
post #33

I routinely get suggested to connect with people I've never even emailed or who used email account I closed a decade ago. It's reasons like this I wish someone would do a Public/Private key based p2p social network. Essentially you digitally sign a key that you know someone and that's how you derive connections. Seems like you could implement browsable profiles as well.

Its a great idea, but I think everyone who has had it is stopped when they look at just how unwilling people are to exchange keys (or understand them) and how unwilling browser companies are to put effort into interfaces for managing keys (both of these obviously feed into each other).

The type of user who uses public keys usually knows better than to use server-side key management on a social networking site (however pretty the interface may be.)

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#86

There's a more benign answer to the creepy connection suggestions. LOTS of people import their email address books into linkedin. It's not a stretch to think that his girlfriend's mother (or some other relative) imported her address book that contained the names of both the OP and the girlfriend's stepfather. As far as the creepier name mismatches go, my oldest email address list has tons of maiden names and unused/d…

I didn't import anything to LinkedIn. One person showed up on mine who could only have come from either my Twitter account or G+ account, both of which have been deleted.

Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#87
post #44
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I set up a test Facebook account while doing a Facebook app that uses an e-mail address that has never been used for anything else. Yet it keeps suggesting people I actually know. The second account also does not have my full name (if it had my full name it'd be less weird, as my name to my knowledge is globally unique - there's only a few hundred people with my last name worldwide) The account has not been used for…

> The only thing connecting the two is that the "fake" e-mail address is a "real-user-part+something@gmail.com" address, and that I've logged in to them from the same machine. So, to summarize, a simple regular expression matching emails against /\+[^@]+/ and replacing with '' is some 1984-level creepiness? Come on.

The technology to do any of those is little more than a few database joins and some fuzzier matching logic like you are suggesting. What's creepy is just the extent to which they match. In the email contacts theory, for example, it's not hard to remember an email address that was in a user's contacts list and then suggest they connect when that email address is used. It's only creepy because you personally had no control over giving them the information that allows them to make that leap.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#88
post #18

Here are some things I find more creepy about LinkedIn: -It tells people when I view their profile. So now I never view people's profiles because I don't want to look like a stalker. Imagine if Facebook worked this way. -An andecdote, but maybe you've experienced it: a guy I worked with about 3 years ago (and only for 2 weeks) has "endorsed" me several times recently. I don't know if this is some kind of quid pro quo…

You can turn off your visibility when browsing other people's profiles. By default, it should be anonymized anyway, unless you switched it when trying to view profile stats : https://www.linkedin.com/settings/wvmp-visibility?goback=%2E... Personally I keep mine fully on since it is a good way of passive contact (I once browsed ~1000 VCs with a headline that was somewhat provocative as an experiment and about half loo…

Thank you for the link. I'm surprised I haven't found earlier on my own. The only problem is though, it says it will disable Profile Stats (meaning that you can't tell who's been looking at your profile). I guess I don't really need that anyway.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#89

Y'all know that I worked for Google. On this topic, I can only say good things about the place. When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard. Many of these "social" innovations that are popping up on the market place were rejected out-of-hand at Google because it holds itself to an extremely high ethical standard regarding user data, as it actually respects them. I was shocked,…

"broken way of doing things. Resumes. Titles and dates of employment. Recommendations. Recruiter spam" How would you do it differently ? Genuinely interested in your opinion on this.

Great question, and it'd take me a long time to answer.

My first thought about resumes is that they serve two purposes, one legitimate and one not:

(a) social status grading, which is easy for douchebags to game and for extortionists ("do or I'll fire you and give you a bad reference") to abuse.

(b) a list of "ask me about " topics where X ranges over areas of professional expertise and interests, so they can probe you during the interview as to what you actually know.

I'd focus on (b) while throwing (a) to the wind. One thought I had is an "allocate 20 points" system. You don't actually have to prove anything because resumes suck at that, but if you put "Machine Learning: 7" that shows that you view yourself as being "35%" Machine Learning and are fairly comfortable discussing it on an interview.

This leads to the concept of a scarce graph, which is weighted but also imposes granularity (e.g. 20-point limit with 1-point minimum units) to prevent sprawl, and forces people to prioritize. Running graph algorithms against scarce graphs, with data pertaining to peoples' desires for connection (new jobs, new candidates) could be interesting.

So there's that. You get as much legitimate information out of a 20-point allocation of interests and experience as you would out of a resume or a job posting. What you don't get is the social status bullshit (dates and titles).

Ok, onto fixing the labor market in general, I think the best solution I can come up with is to build this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/05/07/fixing-employ...

That's Part I. Part II comes from the fact that, if Part I is build, people are going to want to get better, fast, at marketing themselves so their call options trade at a higher rate. That leads naturally into career coaching (a better model than traditional recruiting) but also into objective evaluation of, for example, source code quality. Now we can actually verify that, yes, John is a top-notch programmer and his $200/hr-struck call options actually aren't out of the money.

Part III would be to use all the professional development data thus gathered and start scoring employers based on how much value they add to peoples' careers. How fast does a typical person grow, as a programmer, after 2 years at Google? What does it do for that person's employment potential 10 years down the road? Those would be great things to know.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably just name, location, and interest matching. Especially if you have a fairly uncommon name.

It's using a different name; I don't think I have a location set; and the only similar interest would be League of Legends, since I created the account initially just to get the free promo. The only thing I can think of is that it's matching IP addresses and concluding my two accounts are the same account.

Now that's fascinating. Matching an IP address is a different thing than using information that a user has shared explicitly.
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