Many small startups generate fake traffic, either for testing or for marketing purposes (e.g. cheating on the numbers). I would be surprised to find any successful company that had no shenanigans in their origin story. My history included a startup that shipped empty boxes to meet numbers, scraped thousands of emails from more popular websites to sell as their own traffic, even one that forged stock certificates to s…
LinkedIn famously abused oauth permissions to take over the email accounts of their users and send invites to their service to the contact list. Please don’t normalize this. Just because it has many famous examples does not mean it should ever become socially acceptable. Fuck every company that has done this.
Woah, never knew this. Do you have any reference? I cannot find anything about it.