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LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already

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Re: LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already

#11

Post by adrianb »

I get this all the time on the "suggested connections" page - names and email addresses extracted from my Gmail contacts, but the name is not a link to a profile (on normal suggested connections you can click on the name to see their profiles). I could easily spot those and not request to connect but it can be confusing for non-technical people.

What changed recently is that these fake profiles are also listed as having "shared connections" with me which is hard to believe considering those are not Linkedin profiles at all.

Re: LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already

#13

Post by icebraining »

buro9 wrote: post #7
imdsm wrote: post #4

I can see how this may confuse people who aren't tech savvy, but as a tech person, I immediately recognise this as a ghost profile. When you see five or six of these amongst the actual profiles, and all of them just so happen to be people from your email, possibly who you haven't spoken to in years, you can put 1 and 1 together and know it's a trick.

Literally a ghost profile, the person is dead. LinkedIn must have zero empathy for what loss does to people to use such tactics that can cause distress.

Wouldn't it cause the same distress if the deceased person really had had a LinkedIn account? Seems to me that the distress is not caused by the tactics in and of themselves.

Re: LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already

#14

Post by robinjfisher »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #12

> "LinkedIn allows you to sign in to your email account and it will scan your contacts..." Hand my contacts list to a website? No thank you. When is letting a website have this a good idea, not just Linkedin, but ever ?

Completely agree. I don't actually remember doing it and it's certainly something I do not do any more.

I wasn't quite so security-conscious a few years ago.

Re: LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already

#17

Post by buro9 »

icebraining wrote: post #13
buro9 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally a ghost profile, the person is dead. LinkedIn must have zero empathy for what loss does to people to use such tactics that can cause distress.

Wouldn't it cause the same distress if the deceased person really had had a LinkedIn account? Seems to me that the distress is not caused by the tactics in and of themselves.

Recently deceased is forgiveable. Long-deceased is massively insensitive.

Those suggestions should be restricted to profiles of people recently active that you may know.

Re: LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already

#19

Post by bambax »

zwischenzug wrote: post #8

What is the lie here?

It's a misrepresentation; LinkedIn lets you assume a person from your address book already has a LinkedIn account, and that you should connect with her, whereas in fact she doesn't, and your action will result in inviting her into the system.

(Even more difficult to do when she's dead, although it's unclear whether LinkedIn has a way to know the living status of its real users).

Re: LinkedIn is not using email contacts to find people who have an account already

#20

Post by nomadcoop »

I deleted my LinkedIn account last year because I got tired of dealing with spam emails from them and people bugging me to endorse them for skills. I still get emails from LinkedIn telling me someone would like to connect. For a site which is supposed to be about building professional connections I find them horrible to deal with.
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