What makes it creepy to me is that it is an Experian company.
LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
11–20 of 93 posts
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#12Is LinkedIn even a social network? Everyone I know uses it as basically a resume hosting site. I don't know of anyone who uses it for actually doing anything 'social' - just career related things.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#13LinkedIn has experienced substantial growth in recent years, but they seem to be overstepping their bounds in certain areas.
I'd argue that they've experienced substantial growth precisely because they overstep their bounds. They're actively rewarded for engaging in this kind of behavior, and they rarely (if ever) face any real consequences when they take it too far. And despite the occasional angry blog post, it will continue until there's some sort of mass exodus of users—and even that would most likely be brought on by simple network effects rather than any sort of collective concern for privacy.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#14Creepy experience from this week. We have hired someone for daycare, I only have exchanged a few mail with that person. And now, her husband is in "people I know". I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has, and since we are both in her contact list, Linkedin assumed we know each other. It is somewhat correct but creepy nonetheless. I am not going to add him but from my point of view,…
> I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has
Unfortunately that's not the case, and it's much darker than this.
Recently I was asked by a friend to open a profile for a non-existing character from her book. I had to create an email address to open a linkedin. A new email address. Never used. After creating profile I emailed this new account from my own email.
Week later my profile shows in character's "people you know", and also the character shows in my stream. Never had option to share contacts on with anyone as I oppose those that.
This situation proved to me that LinkedIn has to have some special deal with yahoo (at least) that they are gathering some extra data about people emailing each other. Otherwise there is no chance in hell that character's profile would guess me.
I'm not saying that yahoo provides a database of all your contacts to LinkedIn, but for example they can provide a streamline of md5 emails and then LinkedIn scrub it and match on their own.
There is something going on here much more advance than simple guessing who you may know.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#15Creepy experience from this week. We have hired someone for daycare, I only have exchanged a few mail with that person. And now, her husband is in "people I know". I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has, and since we are both in her contact list, Linkedin assumed we know each other. It is somewhat correct but creepy nonetheless. I am not going to add him but from my point of view,…
She and/or her husband probably checked you out on LinkedIn, that's how he shows up in your 'people I know'. It's not really that creepy.
Some time ago I was put on an assignment at another company, and suddenly people from that company started showing up in my 'people you may know' list. And vice versa probably, since I also checked out some of their profiles. This is just what people do these days when they get a job somewhere.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#16Creepy experience from this week. We have hired someone for daycare, I only have exchanged a few mail with that person. And now, her husband is in "people I know". I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has, and since we are both in her contact list, Linkedin assumed we know each other. It is somewhat correct but creepy nonetheless. I am not going to add him but from my point of view,…
She and/or her husband probably checked you out on LinkedIn, that's how he shows up in your 'people I know'. It's not really that creepy. Some time ago I was put on an assignment at another company, and suddenly people from that company started showing up in my 'people you may know' list. And vice versa probably, since I also checked out some of their profiles. This is just what people do these days when they get a j…
He did not show up in the list of people that visited my profile. He could have done so anonymously though.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#17What makes it creepy to me is that it is an Experian company.
What do you mean by "Experian company"? How is Experian related to this?
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#18Creepy experience from this week. We have hired someone for daycare, I only have exchanged a few mail with that person. And now, her husband is in "people I know". I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has, and since we are both in her contact list, Linkedin assumed we know each other. It is somewhat correct but creepy nonetheless. I am not going to add him but from my point of view,…
I'm always a bit surprised that people find this sort of thing to be creepy. It's done automatically at a large scale by an algorithm - I would bet that there isn't a single human being at LinkedIn who knows that this connection was made (or is even aware of your existence [sorry]). Having said that, I completely agree that "proposing you to add people you only know remotely diminishes the usefulness of the network".…
It is creepy in the sense that it reminds me that every action I am taking online is monitored. And in this particular instance, I don't perceive the added value. Basically when it is useful, it is cool, and when it is not, it is creepy.
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#19[deleted]
Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
#20One time I sent an email to a random celebrity, and literally a few minutes later he showed up in my 'you may know..' list. I became convinced at that point that LI is sniffing SMTP headers at peering points. I don't know how you would cut that deal, but if Google has their CDN everywhere, there's precedent.