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LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

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Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#191

Post by throwaway27z »

gonehome wrote: post #172
throwaway27z wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway because I learned this while NDAed (on-site interview for an internship over 4 years ago), but Facebook USED to allow employees universal profile access. I heard this from the recruiter who took all of us interviewees to lunch and showed us around, etc. - she said she had used it once to look up some dude she thought was creepy. I'm pretty sure they've since changed their policy. Not sure if OP was referrin…

That's pretty horrendous that a recruiter would mention that to you. I'd heard initially there was a master password for fixing things before they had a proper login/auditing setup for account access. Didn't think people would actually be logging into accounts on a whim to check out users.

It wasn't that they could log into any account they wanted (that would be much worse); it was that they could view any profile page they wanted, so it was essentially like an employee could become "friends" with a user, without the user knowing, and without the user's consent.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#192

Post by dennisgorelik »

Aloisius wrote: post #94
rayiner wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "who has viewed your profile" feature leads to epic lulz. There is this forum on the internet that is full or racists, misogynists, and homophobes (and is tangentially useful for getting legal industry gossip). A major troll posted a link to a fake Linked-In page (under his control) with a comment along the lines of: "how did this person get this job with such a shitty resume" (or something like that). When peopl…

Hrm. That shouldn't work unless they are within three degrees of the person. Or at least, it didn't work when I was there. Views to people's public profiles weren't recorded and there is no automatic redirect to their private profile. Links to people's private profiles have an auth token in it that is good only for the account that generated it, so unless you're relatively closely connected, you can't actually view l…

3 degrees of separation covers a lot of people.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#193

Post by koko775 »

throwaway27z wrote: post #138
samstokes wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a certain social network gives universal profile access to employees as a perk This is a rather insidious thing to say without naming the network, particularly in a comment on a post about a particular network. Which is it? I know that both Facebook and LinkedIn have similarly strict rules about what user data you can look at.

Throwaway because I learned this while NDAed (on-site interview for an internship over 4 years ago), but Facebook USED to allow employees universal profile access. I heard this from the recruiter who took all of us interviewees to lunch and showed us around, etc. - she said she had used it once to look up some dude she thought was creepy. I'm pretty sure they've since changed their policy. Not sure if OP was referrin…

From what I have heard they locked that down years ago. Overriding default rights to go admin was logged and if it wasn't justified, the employee who did it was fired. Later, I'm not even sure if it remained an option to manually override it, even with the oversight.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#194

Post by rajivm »

dmbass wrote: post #189
dbrian wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that, for years, Facebook had a universal password that would log you into anyone's account, I'd say that Google's standards are significantly higher than other players in the social sphere. http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-interne...

What exactly makes you think Google doesn't have this feature?

From my experience interning twice at Google, I was very impressed by their standard for privacy and the protections they had put in place. They have teams dedicated to just researching ways to improve information security.

Two projects I found fascinating: 1) A system that analyses all attempts and actual accesses to user data by employees (this access it self was very regulated on a need-only basis), determining whether the given user that was accessed falls somewhere within the employee's likely social graph, and flagging anything suspicious to their security team. So if an employee tried to view their ex's info, or their friend's roommates info, etc. the system would auto-flag them and an investigation would likely result in that employee being immediately terminated.

2) Much of Google's data is accessible by many production services. This is a security weakness, however, there was a project to make the data layer enforce security constraints so that applications could only access data relavent to them, and additionally also enforcing security on a user-level (so an app could only access that user's data if it had an access token for that user). Mind you, this is not even limiting admin access, this is actually preventing the code from accessing the data even if the app's built-in security features fail.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#195

Post by danenania »

rhizome wrote: post #156
smsm42 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a matter of law - means the government wants to enforce it. But why I have to agree with it? I do not have any obligation to respect anything the government of Russia or Iran does.

If you're doing business there, you do. If you're not, then let their firewall or whatever deal with it, but I doubt that's Google's situation.

To the extent that it is feasible, we should follow moral and ethical principles, not laws.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#196

Post by josh2600 »

illuminate wrote: post #54
josh2600 wrote: post #6

I don't know, LinkedIn seems a lot less creepy than Facebook. I mean some of the ads I get hit with would make many folks blush.

"some of the ads I get hit with would make many folks blush" I'm guessing the "likes" you have that cause the targeted ads to hone in on you would also make many folks blush. At least, before I shut mine down some months ago, I had plenty of interesting likes but I never had any ads that didn't match my content.

I appreciate your insinuation about my "likes". I don't really have anything "liked" on my Facebook but please, go ahead and tell me about how my personal preferences are affecting my online experience.

I'm happy that your anecdotal experience was different from mine, but your empirical evidence does not undermine mine.

Good day sir.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#197

Post by rXoX »

smsm42 wrote: post #152
rhizome wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a legal standard because the Russian censorship you describe is a matter of existing law. Also, note Yahoo's experiences with France.

It is a matter of law - means the government wants to enforce it. But why I have to agree with it? I do not have any obligation to respect anything the government of Russia or Iran does.

... and that, boys and girls is how people were jailed in Guantanamo! Or you could ask yourself - what would Bradley Manning do - if he wasn't reduced to a drooling, half brained imbecile?

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#198

Post by grimman »

dbrian wrote: post #117
onemorepassword wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it comes to privacy and PII, Google holds itself to an extremely high standard. With all due respect, but you've gotta joking. Google doesn't even hold itself to the standards set by the laws in countries it operates in. Laws that are for now still full of loopholes Google happily exploits with zero restraint, despite knowing full well (not in the last place because they've been warned on a regular basis) that…

Considering that, for years, Facebook had a universal password that would log you into anyone's account, I'd say that Google's standards are significantly higher than other players in the social sphere. http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-interne...

This is a non-argument. Just because other actors do certain things does not excuse ANYTHING. Period.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#199

Post by blowski »

Silhouette wrote: post #166
blhack wrote: post #91

I finally joined linkedin about a week ago, and it just feels...scammy. It's interesting to me (or frightening) that some of the smartest people I know have the fewest endorsements. People I know doing [1] actual real work on things like "microcontrollers" have...3-4 endorsements with them, but people who I know have only maybe installed Linux, have 20 or so endorsements for "linux". There are people I know who are p…

I'll keep just linking people to my github, and showing them projects I've built. [1]: Actual real work as in: writing libraries that other people use. Contributing to the community in ways that effect the entire community. I worry a little about the GitHub approach as well. On the one hand, it's great that some people have effectively got portfolios now. It's verifiable evidence that they have some clue what they're…

Any scheme at all is always going to be vulnerable to false negatives. There are companies that have multiple-stage recruitment, with skill tests, psychometric tests, multi-person interviews, background checking - and still end up with a few duds.

But if you can use a bunch of proxies (like StackOverflow, GitHub, and LinkedIn), and know the value of each of those proxies, then you can more efficiently match a person with a role. Sure, there'll be lots of mistakes, but it's hard to see a better alternative.

Re: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network

#200

Post by vsl »

grimman wrote: post #198
dbrian wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that, for years, Facebook had a universal password that would log you into anyone's account, I'd say that Google's standards are significantly higher than other players in the social sphere. http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-interne...

This is a non-argument. Just because other actors do certain things does not excuse ANYTHING. Period.

Well, the claim was that Google's standard is higher than that of (some) other actors, so the behavior of the other actors is kind of directly relevant...
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