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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

#31

Post by seestheday »

xauronx wrote: post #26
waterfowl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I notice that whenever I update my profile I tend to get a huge increase in emails.

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

#32

Post by 6cxs2hd6 »

From the article I understand the suit is by LinkedIn members whose contact book was (in their opinion) abused to send these invitation emails to non-members. On the face of it that's a reasonable claim and seems they should prevail.

But also: How about the recipients -- who are getting repeated unsolicited commercial emails? How does this activity not violate CAN-SPAM? Shouldn't LinkedIn be subject to fines?

Edit: Although I don't terribly mind the downvote, especially if it was accidental -- I did read the whole article and had a genuine question.

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

#33

Post by josu »

Zelphyr wrote: post #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…

>page views

Why does Linkedin care about pageviews?

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

#34

Post by nevi-me »

I used to be on LinkedIn, but deleted my profile a year and half ago. I still get e-mails about invitations from people who know me, and whenever I choose to unsubscribe from them, I still get them.

The scary thing is that when you click through the link to confirm, they used to ask you to 'change a password' implying that a ghost account in your name already exists. I just checked it now, and it just offers me to create an account instead.

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

#35

Post by larrys »

waterfowl wrote: post #11
vonmoltke wrote: post #10

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…

You probably should develop a different attitude for you own benefit.

You are just starting out and the shit recruiter today may very well progress in their career (perhaps they are even a newbie to recruiting) and you may need them down the road.

Even if annoying, no sense to burn bridges. You can always be polite and keep the door open. Your job prospects may be good today but not in 5 or 10 years.

As far as "harassed" welcome to the world of outbound selling. If you were out of a job and were sending out resumes and contacting potential employment prospects how would you like if they said that you were "harassing" them?

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

#36

Post by MichaelGG »

Zelphyr wrote: post #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…

Presumably they try to drive up page views in order to make more revenue. Are you saying that they wouldn't do the same if they were still privately held?

Maybe after their IPO the thought is that they're no longer going to get magical money raining down on them, so they actually have to try to generate more profit?

Although it must be hard for people with option grants when there's a P/E approaching 1000 and you need the price to keep going up to do well.

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

#37

Post by 001sky »

josu wrote: post #33
Zelphyr wrote: post #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…

>page views Why does Linkedin care about pageviews?

Pretty clearly stated in the comment you are replying to.

Investment Bankers care about pageviews. Valuations are driven by operating metrics when financial metrics alone cannot support a valuation at desired levels. Since linked-in executives get a cut of the IPO proceeds (directly or indirectly), the logical link follows that "the company" cares about these things. Or at least they did in the context of pre-IPO window dressing.

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

#38

Post by MichaelGG »

sbov wrote: post #30
prezjordan wrote: post #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…

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.

SPF allows you to fake the From header, so long your Return-Path is your own domain and passes checks. DMARC can pass if SPF passes. To end users, there's no discernible difference when there's another Return-Path domain.

DKIM does allow you to force the From header to be signed, so hopefully that'll continue to pick up steam. It does break some things, like some mailing lists, and that probably contributes to why it's taken so long to get such things going. There's also a lot of "business critical" software out there that just assumes it can send as any user.

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

#39

Post by _delirium »

prezjordan wrote: post #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…

It depends on how the spam-filtering is implemented, but mark-as-spam should still hurt them in a well-designed system. The 'From' is set to the person in question, but the envelope sender is correctly identified as LinkedIn (or else the mails would often fail SPF checks), and you can filter based on that.

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

#40

Post by josu »

001sky wrote: post #37
josu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>page views Why does Linkedin care about pageviews?

Pretty clearly stated in the comment you are replying to. Investment Bankers care about pageviews. Valuations are driven by operating metrics when financial metrics alone cannot support a valuation at desired levels. Since linked-in executives get a cut of the IPO proceeds (directly or indirectly), the logical link follows that "the company" cares about these things. Or at least they did in the context of pre-IPO win…

Sorry, I thought that Linkedin didn't serve ads, I should have checked before.
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