LinkedIn denies harvesting user email accounts without permission

LinkedIn denied charges that the company breaks into the email accounts of its members without permission to harvest contacts’ addresses.

A class action complaint by four users has charged the professional networking site with hacking into their external email accounts and downloading addresses of their contacts for monetary gain by repeatedly promoting its services to these contacts.

Paul Perkins, Pennie Sempell, Ann Brandwein, and Erin Eggers charged LinkedIn with breaking into “its users’ third party email accounts, downloading email addresses that appear in the account, and then sending out multiple reminder emails ostensibly on behalf of the user advertising LinkedIn to non-members.”

The so-called hacking of the user’s email account and download of addresses is done without “clearly notifying the user or obtaining his or her consent,” which is likely to emerge as the crux of the case.

LinkedIn does not access a user’s email account without the user’s permission, and claims that it hacks or breaks into members’ accounts are false, Blake Lawit, senior director of litigation at LinkedIn wrote in a blog post on Saturday. LinkedIn never deceives by “pretending to be you” in order to access the user’s email account, Lawit wrote.

“We never send messages or invitations to join LinkedIn on your behalf to anyone unless you have given us permission to do so,” he added.

New users signing in to LinkedIn are asked for the external email address as their user name, though they aren’t told what it will be used for, according to the complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

If a LinkedIn user leaves an external email account open, LinkedIn is said to pretend to be that user and downloads the email addresses in that account to LinkedIn servers, according to the complaint. Linkedln is able to download the addresses without requesting the password for the external email accounts or obtaining users’ consent, according to the complaint.

If the LinkedIn user has logged out from his email applications, the network requests the user name and password of an external email account to ostensibly verify the identity of the user, and then, without notice or consent, attempts to access the user’s external email account to download email addresses, according to the complaint.

Linkedln does not inform its users that email addresses harvested from a user’s external email account will be sent multiple emails inviting the recipient to join Linkedln with the user’s endorsement, the complaint said. Users have complained to Linkedln about its “unethical harvesting” of email addresses and repeated spamming of those addresses, according to the complaint, which asks the court for damages and an order prohibiting LinkedIn from continuing its “wrongful and unlawful acts.”

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service.
More by John Ribeiro, IDG News Service

View the original article here

LinkedIn adds University Pages to help the college-bound

Not satisfied with providing a way for people to network, LinkedIn wants to tap into its user base to help people figure out where to go to college.

The newly launched University Pages lets users type in the name of the school they’re considering. LinkedIn will return a trove of data on the university in question. Much of this data is powered by LinkedIn’s user base of 200 million. Just below a cover image for the university, LinkedIn shows aggregate information on the school’s alumni, including where they live, where they work and what industries they’re employed in. Clicking on any of these sections shows a list of alumni from the school, with links to their profiles on LinkedIn.

Users can also look up basic information about the school, such as contact information, the number of students, graduation rates, student-to-faculty ratio and tuition rates. A sidebar on the page shows notable alumni, people you know with connections to the university and a list of similar schools.

Look up a school with LinkedIn’s University Pages, and you can get a breakdown of where alumni work in addition to other data. (Click to enlarge.)

LinkedIn also hopes these pages will help connect alumni to each other, and to help employers recruit recent graduates. Employers will be able to come up with ideal candidates and advertise jobs to students who fit the bill.

It seems like a helpful way to get some basic information about the university, though it’d be nice if LinkedIn let prospective students sift through the data in more advanced ways. For instance, you can’t find out how many students on LinkedIn land a job right after graduation.

There’s also one noteworthy terms of service change LinkedIn had to make for this feature: In the United States and several other countries, the minimum age for the site is now 14, which allows high school students to connect with college students and alumni. By default, minors’ profiles do not appear in search engine results, their last names and birthdates aren’t shown, and their photos will only be visible to first-degree connections. LinkedIn also says it will show links to safety and privacy information on minors’ pages.

At the moment, LinkedIn says it has pages for 200 universities, but it will be adding “thousands more schools” over the next few weeks.

View the original article here