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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

#101

Post by downandout »

Your headline is extremely misleading. They are a public company and thus it is quite unlikely that they are lying about user numbers. That is a fantastic and relatively speedy way for a CEO to go to jail.

What they are doing is using your contacts list to mislead you into believing that many of your contacts are already on Linkedin. Once they get you to connect with yet-to-exist accounts, then they can legitimately spam your friends saying that you want to connect with them. Interesting strategy, but it will earn them some backlash.

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

#102

Post by bavcyc »

nomadcoop wrote: post #20

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.

I had a traditional, i.e. one that wanted salary history and other non-relevant information, recruiter tell me during a discussion that person x at linkedin says you should provide this information.

This is when I realized that linkedin in not about professional relationship but about recruiting folks and that recruiters will find it most useful.

As I can find a job without a recruiter, linkedin's value to me is close to zero.

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

#103

Post by dspillett »

jrockway wrote: post #63
dspillett wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as being a stupid thing to do, it is usually also a break of the agreement between the user and their mail provider. These usually have a clause stating that you agree to never share your credentials with a 3rd party except where required to by law.

Maybe in corporate email systems, but I've never seen a legal requirement to not share my credentials in any sort of consumer service.

I wouldn't say it was a legal requirement (as a lot of such things have not been tested in court) but I've seen it in a few places, usually in the section about you being responsible for anything that happens with your account.

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

#104

Post by [deleted] »

grey-area wrote: post #94
jebus989 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence LinkedIn reports all members email contacts as LinkedIn users? The g+ post just displays OP's confusion at "connect" really meaning "invite" in instances where contacts don't have a LinkedIn account.

It's the struggle to report more and more users every quarter that is damaging; this leads to the concept of users and their contact list as the property of websites and dark patterns like this. Is there any evidence LinkedIn reports all members email contacts as LinkedIn users? I have no idea if LinkedIn reports ghost users as real in annual reports but I'm sure they'll report users, and creating ghosts and deceivin…

[deleted]

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

#105

Post by downandout »

grey-area wrote: post #61

This obsession with collecting users (dead or alive) reminds me of Gogol's Dead Souls - companies trading in users (who may or may not exist) in order to boost their standing and taking out huge loans on the basis of their illusory popularity. Even illusory users can have some value, just like the dead serfs in Gogol's tale, and like the dead serfs, their value is not in their existence, but in being entries on a led…

They are not reporting these to investors as accounts. Every time someone that knows someone else hits the connect button, it gives LinkedIn another opportunity to spam that user on their behalf - pummeling them until they sign up. This is an aggressive (though somewhat scummy) growth strategy, not an investment fraud strategy.

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

#106

Post by thescrewdriver »

reinhardt wrote: post #67
iand wrote: post #37

I've never intentionally shared my contacts with LinkedIn and yet I get shown names from my address book. One was my teenage son and I tried to connect thinking he'd signed up for some reason. Nope, he'd never even considered it. I don't know where LinkedIn got my contacts from but I suspect I must have missed a setting when I briefly installed the mobile app a few years ago. Some of the email addresses they have are…

Came here to post the same; after seeing as "people you may know" some email contacts that may not even know what LinkedIn is (such as my mom), I strongly suspect they're doing something even more shady to grab my contacts. I have never installed the mobile app.

It's super-creepy. All you need is someone who has previously emailed or chatted to you via e.g. gmail to give their email address and password to LinkedIn to "find contacts". The seem to go about mining a graph they have constructed using various people's email correspondence/address books, even including contacts via a nameless email addresses you never provided to LinkedIn.

When I signed up I saw a bunch of people I had as contacts on a gmail account which I hardly ever use. I had NOT used said gmail account when signing up for LinkedIn (and no LinkedIn app etc.). They seemed to have somehow associated me with contacts for an email address I had told them nothing about by piecing together the contact lists of the small number of contacts I added on LinkedIn and linked the name in their address books to my unnamed gmail account. I simply don't trust them anymore.

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

#107

Post by jhandl »

pdevr wrote: post #55
weixiyen wrote: post #24

Really surprised by all the comments here. This seems like a solid business decision by LinkedIn, riding the line of what a user is willing to accept and balancing it well with the potential rewards. Look at every famous company and you'll find tactics that you don't agree with, and sometimes downright illegal (Path). If you're not willing to do desperate things, to do what is necessary for user acquisition, good luc…

>Look at every famous company and you'll find tactics that you don't agree with Most people here recognize that growth hacking is necessary for a startup to grow. The users complain only when the tactics employed do not result in a better experience for them. This was not the case when AirBnB, YouTube, etc executed their growth hacking tactics. AirBnB: Their growth hacking tactic of posting to Craigslist resulted in…

How is growing their user base not making the experience better? Most people use LinkedIn to find people, no?

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

#108

Post by wyclif »

waylandsmithers wrote: post #99
grey-area wrote: post #61

This obsession with collecting users (dead or alive) reminds me of Gogol's Dead Souls - companies trading in users (who may or may not exist) in order to boost their standing and taking out huge loans on the basis of their illusory popularity. Even illusory users can have some value, just like the dead serfs in Gogol's tale, and like the dead serfs, their value is not in their existence, but in being entries on a led…

Sounds a lot like Google+ at the beginning. "We have 100 million users!!!" Well no, you funneled people using search, gmail, and youtube into some annoying screen where they clicked around to make it go away.

That's not what they did. It should be noted that in the announcements that I've seen, Google has counted only active Google+ users.

This is the "ghost town" ruse all over again. It's weak sauce and demonstrably facile. You can bash Google+ all you want, but it's not going to impress people who enjoy using it very much.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/the-loyal-users-of-...

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

#110

Post by jhandl »

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.

How should anybody know, from an email address alone, if the owner is alive?
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