I don't love them owning my "job-searching" identity too.
Seems like the most valuable service they have to offer is to corporations. "Want to know how often your employee is updating their resume? Pay us for access." Of course they'll spin it differently, but in short that's the value.
It has happened before.
Even I was shocked how tens of thousands of companies handed over mind blowingly valuable customer data to Facebook. They aggressively promoted their Facebook Page to their customer base: please like us on Facebook!
What did Facebook do? They took that data and sold it to competitors as ad inventory. I never saw a single company owner complain. Companies spent millions of dollars and years of effort building up a customer base, and just handed it right over to Facebook.
To put it in more blunt terms, Facebook stole companies assets through social engineering. I saw friends turn around and build profitable, multi-million dollar businesses through this single data usurpation channel.
Will companies get more savvy about locking down their data? I'm not counting on it.
The rest of your comment is spot on though, so thanks for posting it.
This is tough stuff.
It isn't that hard :)
I was deliberately and enthusiastically nodding with the "we are not the property of our employers" bit. Then you dropped the O-word and now, mostly because I'm curious to the point of disaster, I think I actually kind of need to see one argue that 'poach' is carte-blanche "offensive".
/s
MS certainly treats Windows users like cattle so there is always a possibility that they would do something similar with job seeker or employee data. There is nothing offensive about pointing out unethical practices of such companies or the potential to abuse the data.