LinkedIn Accused of Hacking Customers' E-Mails To Slurp Up Contacts

cold fjord writes with this Business Week report: "LinkedIn Corp. ... was sued by customers who claim the company appropriated their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts' addresses. The customers, who aim to lead a group suit against LinkedIn, asked a federal judge in San Jose, California, to bar the company from repeating the alleged violations and to force it to return any revenue stemming from its use of their identities to promote the site ... 'LinkedIn's own website contains hundreds of complaints regarding this practice,' they said in the complaint filed Sept. 17. ... LinkedIn required the members to provide an external e-mail address as their username on its site, then used the information to access their external e-mail accounts when they were left open ... 'LinkedIn pretends to be that user and downloads the e-mail addresses contained anywhere in that account to LinkedIn's servers,' they said. 'LinkedIn is able to download these addresses without requesting the password for the external e-mail accounts or obtaining users' consent.'" "This puts an interesting twist on LinkedIn's recent call for transparency," adds cold fjord. (More at Bloomberg.)

Data Mining or Cyber-Yenta?

[retroworks]

I certainly noticed LinkedIn had access to my email sent-lists, but after logging into it a thousand times it's hard to know for sure I didn't check, or fail to check, a box that comes up asking my permission to do so. It just takes one time. Maybe this case will succeed, I'm afraid I've succumbed to thinking we have no more privacy or right to cover our tracks than we did walking past gossipy women in medieval villages. LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook have become the modern day cyber-Yentas, sometimes aggravatingly meddlesome, sometimes making a lifelong connection.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21, 2013 @09:55AM. Oh shoot...

LinkedIn is a joke

[paiute]

When random people I know only slightly and who don't know my skill set are allowed to "endorse" me for knowledge and training they don't know that I have, it makes the whole of LinkedIn worthless to me except as a source of phone numbers. And often those are not even available. It has become Facebook with a clip-on tie.

Re:This happened to me

[Zero__Kelvin]

What is it? I want to make sure I don't use the same one.

Re:This happened to me

[Andrewkov]

Yeah, I'd be embarrassed to have a LinkedIn account too.

Re:What the hell is "left open"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Help help, I am the real Astronomerguy. The person above hacked my LinkedIn account. Please contact Cyberpolice.

Re:What the hell is "left open"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off yourself you sanctimonious cunt. Linkedin performed social engineering techniques to trick users to entered their email credentials. This is illegal almost everywhere except the US. You're the kind of limey wanker that blames people for using ATMs when there's a skimmer installed. How about you fuck off and fix your green teeth and learn to speak properly?