LinkedIn Agrees To Block Stalkers 78
sholto writes "When Buzzfeed wrote about LinkedIn's stalker problem in June, LinkedIn claimed it had enough privacy tools "to effectively minimize unwanted connections". But a petition by a 24-year-old Ohio woman sexually assaulted by her boss and harassed through the network appears to have won the day for privacy advocates. LinkedIn said it was adding a blocking feature to protect members against stalkers. 'I can confirm that we’re in the process of building (a block feature),' responded Paul Rockwell, head of trust and safety at LinkedIn to a post in LinkedIn’s help forum called 'Stalking on LinkedIn'. 'Users on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other sites can easily block other users. LinkedIn appears to be an outlier among other top social media sites,' said petitioner Anna R."
No link in article but it's underlined? (Score:5, Informative)
The buzzfeed article appears to be:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/linkedin-has-a-stalker-problem [buzzfeed.com]
Complicated. (Score:5, Informative)
I feel like I need to explain something to people who may not use LinkedIn but use other social networks. LinkedIn has this feature that tells you when your profile has been viewed. If you have the "pro" version, it even tells you WHO has viewed your profile, unless that person has their settings set otherwise. The reason for this is because it is mostly a tool for job seekers and professionals; knowing someone has viewed your profile might be a good conversation starter at that company..
Secondly, large parts of people's profiles (namely, their work history) at LinkedIn are typically public to a large degree. This is because if you have your profile locked down to only friends, then a head hunter will never see you, so it limits the use of the service.
Now what this woman is complaining about is this. The person who harassed her would, every single day, check her LinkedIn profile. This would, in turn, send her an alert, saying that he viewed it.
What she wants LinkedIn to do, is not block him from viewing her profile - that makes no sense because her profile is public. What she wants them to do is stop having the alerts go through. IE - she doesn't seem to care that this guy can see her profile - she just doesn't want to know about it.
I can see both sides of this. From her point of view, this is just another way that this guy is causing her grief. From LinkedIn's point of view, it is a strange request and may be difficult to implement architecturally, because you want the information to remain public, and want the alerts to remain, but only not alert for this specific black-list of people.