Ask HN: Did LinkedIn started selling user emails last month? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did LinkedIn started selling user emails last month?

7 pointsuser59944619 comments

I've noticed in the past few weeks, I started getting automated emails from random job platforms and recruiters like "We've noticed your profile on LinkedIn and registered you on our (competing) website etc...".

What makes these odd is that the email is sent straight to my personal email. It's not going through LinkedIn to a random generated email like it used to.

However the personal email is not part of the public profile, they shouldn't have been able to scrape it in the first place.

That leaves only two explanations. Either LinkedIn started selling user personal emails away or company found a way to get private info from profiles?

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I advertise a lot on LinkedIn- they aren’t selling your email address (at least not that I’ve seen).

It wouldn’t be in their financial interest to do so. Their goal is to get you to do outreach on their platform, which requires use of credits (which aren’t cheap). Giving away emails would undercut their entire business model.

So, safe to say it’s some other way they are getting your address.

> Giving away emails would undercut their entire business model.

And selling them without permission would also probably land them the largest fine in the history of data protection law.

'I saw you on LinkedIn' is a decent intro for a spammer even if it isn't true, and a lot of email addresses are linkable to LinkedIn profiles vs email harvesting tools, including both emails you've actually put on LinkedIn and emails elsewhere on the internet or in easily-guessable firstname.lastname@company.com formats.

There are now a ton of websites where you can buy email addresses, like hunter.io (and many others). Getting emails isn’t all that challenging these days.

Is it really not free to do outreach to candidates on LinkedIn? I figured it was free and it was only the weird featured/highlighted messages people were paying for, because for paid outreach the quality of what I get sent is mostly really poor and very rarely seems targeted at all.

Correct. Not free. Quite expensive actually. If they reach out to you directly it’s costing them likely a few dollars per message.

I noticed I got one the other day. It was an aliased email tied only to LinkedIn.

I was wondering the same thing, especially since I've since changed the email since the 2012 breach.

Or the recruiter came to your profile, saw your last position and tried contacting you at name@company.com. It's been happening to me a lot since November, when I switched jobs and got an email address just like this.

Or your email address is in another mailing list that was sold by another company.

That or you're still using the same email address that was disclosed in the 2012 data breach that LinkedIn suffered... which is easily obtainable.

Have you tried hunter.io and seeing if your email can be scraped with tools like that?

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