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LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

engineering.linkedin.com

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Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#42

Post by aeberbach »

Misleading title. Nobody did the impossible on iOS, just did clever things within the available frameworks. Well done author, it works. But did you ask yourself "should I really do this?"

What I hope is going to prove truly impossible is doing anything like this without requiring the user to explicitly accept the configuration profile. Even so I expect they will trick many into allowing "enhancement" of their email.

LinkedIn has a history of abusing email. From the early days* where they would email all of the contacts on your machine if you didn't read carefully enough to today where you can click unsubscribe many, many times and still get "important updates". It's a wretched hive of scum and recruiters, and they will never get between me and my email.

*spoke too soon! looks like they still do it: http://community.linkedin.com/questions/10106/i-want-linkedi...

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#47

Post by donretag »

amirmc wrote: post #24
nwh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additional madness when the services inevitably closes and tens of thousands of corporate tickets are files about non-working email clients.

Why would the service close? It's supported by LinkedIn and AFAIK they're not in the habit of shutting things down. This almost feels like a no-brainer for them, especially given the move to mobile devices and locked-down apps. Edit: Have I missed the point? I'm sure LinkedIn is a little more cautious about such changes than your average newly-founded startup. This product gives them access to people emails which the…

"It's supported by LinkedIn and AFAIK they're not in the habit of shutting things down"

You mean besides job agents, Answers, Events, ...

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#48

Post by uptown »

Apart from actually giving them the power to slip-stream their content into your messages, how is this different (access-wise) to what people have granted to the email-management app Mailbox? Seems like in both cases, you're handing control of your inbox content over to an additional 3rd party unnecessarily.

Re: LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS

#49

Post by pallandt »

tptacek wrote: post #17

I don't care who the company is, or how trustworthy you think they are: avoid giving third parties credentials to your inbox.

Couldn't agree more, not just because of the possible security implications, but also because it can seriously back-fire against you, in terms of potentially damaging your reputation.

A closely related example would be of a web app I stumbled upon recently via an unexpected email I received in my LinkedIn inbox about a new educational platform that supposedly one of my contacts was recommending me to try. Curious and suspicious, I opened the link and clicked on 'connect with LinkedIn'. In small script, the app was requiring me to authorize it to send emails on my behalf, which is exactly the case of the original unsolicited message I had received: another unsuspecting user just glossed over the terms and connected their LinkedIn account to this app....resulting in all of their contacts being spammed with the message. The 'victim' was displeased to say the least when I warned them what their account was doing without their knowledge.

Had I not been careful about that and proceeded to authorize the app, I would've most likely been booted off at least a few people's contact lists for spamming them with such stuff irrelevant to their interests.

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