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Comment by yawnxyz | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when Linkedin or Lunchclub does a "connect your friends!" and you accidentally click a button and it literally launches spam invites for your entire address book.

Worst part is that NO ONE has ever called them out for such a dark pattern, but the pattern forces ppl to send unsolicited emails to their contacts AND pretends it's meant to be sent by the person.

Incredibly devious

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This one is kind of on the os platform though. I can’t think of a legit use case where an app should get access to every single contact in my address book. This is incredibly personal information, and should be guarded better, perhaps by asking consent for each access and for each contact. The app should have to explain in detail why it wants access to a particular contact.

> I can’t think of a legit use case where an app should get access to every single contact in my address book.

To manage your contacts? The permission to access all your contacts does need to exist, even if it's currently overused.

I am totally willing to do away with third-party contact managers if it means preventing this malarkey.

I completely stopped using linkedin once I realized they were doing this. I don't think my career has suffered.

I accidentally signed into gmail via LinkedIn a while back and it caused me grief for months. I had to write a number of apologetic emails, and I’m still annoyed at LinkedIn -it’s been 13 years.

This has happened a few times with alumni from my college, except their address book automatically syncs large mailing lists are contacts...

This results in a LinkedIn invite getting sent out to thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Literally malware-level behavior.

Signal did this when I signed up and gave access to contacts. I usually don’t give access to contacts but this is Signal!

Which remind me that DP of Signal is not very usable unless you give it access to your contact. When you try to send message by number it will say Error, Request failed: client error (429).

Linked in also makes you create an account to view more than one profile/month. Facebook might also, but I never use facebook so I’m not sure.

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