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LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

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Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#21

Ugh definitely. The awful thing is that they harvest your email from someone's address book and then bombard you with "people you may know" on your actual legitimate Linkedin account(tied into that email). LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't…

I don't know if that kind of contact works, but I have gotten a very well-paying full-time, full-benefits job through LinkedIn. I hate their spamming practices, but I do find the site useful.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#22
LinkedIn is a classic example of how a company must shift from serving their customer to serving their investors after they go public.

They used to be a very useful service.[1] But the closer they got to their IPO the more the started doing things that were clearly in the best interest of generating more page views regardless of how valuable those things were to their users. To my mind this lawsuit was brought about because of that very behavior.

1: Not accounting for the recruiters who have plagued it. Something LinkedIn could probably deal with but they don't want to because that would affect page views.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#23

Ugh definitely. The awful thing is that they harvest your email from someone's address book and then bombard you with "people you may know" on your actual legitimate Linkedin account(tied into that email). LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't…

I don't know if that kind of contact works, but I have gotten a very well-paying full-time, full-benefits job through LinkedIn. I hate their spamming practices, but I do find the site useful.

I've been contacted through LinkedIn by several uninteresting recruiters, but also directly by many big names in tech for seemingly high quality jobs. There's good and there's bad on LinkedIn, but it certainly isn't worthless. By now it has the market penetration to be very difficult to replace, and it could be made great if it were just a little less annoying.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#24
post #17

While it may be a worthwhile case my solution to the few linkedin emails I received was to mark them as spam and move on.

I had to create a rule in gmail. Marking them as spam didn't seem to work too well and still a lot slipped through. Now anything that has linkedin.com in subject, from, to, and body is automatically deleted.

That's going to cause problems for you one day. Some people put their LinkedIn in their signatures.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#25

Ugh definitely. The awful thing is that they harvest your email from someone's address book and then bombard you with "people you may know" on your actual legitimate Linkedin account(tied into that email). LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't…

The really terrible thing is how hard it is to get those contacts OUT of the system. The best part is once you figure out how, they only let you delete 100 at a time (odd they had the capability to upload more than that at once). Just spent an hour last week doing this.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I have certainly had my share of clueless recruiters contact me through LinkedIn, I have also had a good number of decent contacts that either didn't pan out or which I just wasn't interested in. I don't get nearly the deluge of contacts that some people here say they get, though.

I'm pretty early career(graduated in 2012) and even I get harassed on the regular. Maybe they bother younger people more because they think we're less expensive(which is generally true) but the only "legit" linkedin recruiters I ever heard from seemed like Google/FB/Palantir/etc"spam every graduating CS kid in x region" as an invitation to apply rather than a normal "recruiting for a specific opening" type thing. May…

I think there's something at play with when you're "looking". I didn't update anything to specifically say that I was in the market for a new job, but when I was, I was receiving a shitload of emails. Now that I switched jobs and I'm happily employed for about a year I only get like one every couple weeks. Not sure what kind of algorithm they use but it's pretty good.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#27
My favorite LinkedIn feature is how invitations are not sent by linkedin.com, but your friend/colleague/etc. This way, marking it as spam doesn't hurt them.

I had to go through several rounds of customer support to get my information off of their site. "You don't have an account" they would repeat - of course I don't, which is why it bothers me that I still get invitations and show up in your "recommended" lists.

Not to mention the fake endorsements.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#29
post #25

Ugh definitely. The awful thing is that they harvest your email from someone's address book and then bombard you with "people you may know" on your actual legitimate Linkedin account(tied into that email). LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't…

The really terrible thing is how hard it is to get those contacts OUT of the system. The best part is once you figure out how, they only let you delete 100 at a time (odd they had the capability to upload more than that at once). Just spent an hour last week doing this.

How do I do this? Annoying they are recommending some people just because we had email contact.

Re: LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit

#30

My favorite LinkedIn feature is how invitations are not sent by linkedin.com, but your friend/colleague/etc. This way, marking it as spam doesn't hurt them. I had to go through several rounds of customer support to get my information off of their site. "You don't have an account" they would repeat - of course I don't, which is why it bothers me that I still get invitations and show up in your "recommended" lists. Not…

There's protections against this sort of thing that major isps implement. You can't just set your from address to whatever you want. Well you can, but it would be likely be rejected, or at least wouldn't reach your target's inbox.
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