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Comment by pyuser583 | Hacker News Reader

I remember when LinkedIn would take your contacts, and bombard them with "friend requests." For me it resulted in some inappropriate "requests." I'm glad that isn't happening anymore.

At the same time, it's not like LinkedIn is paying any price for that.

So the rule is, engage in as much bad behavior as you can when it's permitted, because later it might not be an option.

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That is why I do not really use LinkedIn to this day. They are still invasive in the amount of data they collect and share.

And then they are pushy with what they want to spread, but sooo very bad at providing info you need and try to get.

I don’t have LinkedIn on my phone because I suspect they were listening to my microphone and serving me ads based on it. I didn’t dig deep to prove it but it seemed pretty clear at the time.

A more likely explanation is that LinkedIn knows where you are from location data and they might know where your friends are because they have the app installed (they can otherwise purchase location data that's collected and shared from a billion other apps). Then they see that you and Alice were in the same location for the past hour while Bob, who was also there, was looking up stuff you were talking about on google. Then LinkedIn shows you ads for that stuff because they suspect a discussion had been happening about the things Bob was looking up.

A common retort I've seen to that is, "Nobody made any such searches during the conversation." So I try a different route: how does LinkedIn know what's relevant to advertise to you based on conversations that are picked up on your microphone?

Let's assume LinkedIn can isolate the voice of every individual on the planet (or, perhaps more relevant, every individual in your home town) and Alice is talking to you about their new air fryer such that it's picked up by your phone's microphone. LinkedIn might advertise air fryers to you because they think Alice was talking to you about air fryers.

But what if Charlie is telling Dave -- both of whom you don't know and are only near you because you're waiting in line at the grocery store -- about their new air fryer? LinkedIn can advertise air fryers to you but that won't necessarily be so eerily relevant. How would LinkedIn know to show you air fryers because Alice was talking to you about them but not to show you air fryers because Charlie was talking to Dave about them? Both conversations were picked up by your phone's microphone so, ostensibly, they would both be equally relevant for advertising.

(That's all assuming that they can hide the otherwise-inexplicable battery usage of an always-on microphone.)

Not to downplay the creep factor, just pointing out that they are probably not disregarding established audio-recording law and are instead doing other surveillance things to show you such relevant advertisements.

> Nobody made any such searches during the conversation

During doesn’t matter a bit, the marketing surveillance is just oppressive and the metadata connections are magic.

If I am platform that relies on advertising for my revenue and I know that three people were recently together. I also know that two of them did internet searches and landed on an air fryer manufacturer pages where I have a tracking code at some point in time after. I am def going to throw air fryer advertising I have at all three because air fryers have a better than even chance that they were mentioned in that group. What’s fun is that third person who didn’t search is gonna likely think I was listening in…

Then, when number two three days later starts searching for air fryer recipes…I’ll probably stop tossing air fryer advertising at all three because I know my micro campaign worked like a charm.

If you're using a mobile OS that you suspect has APIs that can allow this at all, you shouldn't be using that OS.

The iPhone has an indicator at the top of the screen that's present during and for several seconds after when any app is using your camera or microphone. Even for built-in system apps like the native camera.

I'd like to think Apple's financial motivation for user trust outweighs whatever money they could be getting by offering backdoors for LinkedIn of all things. Not to mention the lawsuits they could be facing for letting an app listen to users unbeknownst to them for a bit of Microsoft kickback. This is after introducing a user privacy measure that basically undermined the entirety of Facebook's monetization strategy (site that was majority of internet traffic) and forced them to do a major pivot a few years ago.

The iPhone also requires all apps that want to use the microphone to gain your permission, at least the first time.

So if you never gave LinkedIn permission to use your microphone (or did once, but then went into Settings and revoked it), unless they have found a way to backdoor iOS's permissions structure, the LinkedIn app is absolutely, 100%, not listening to you on your iPhone.

Maybe that's how it is today, but is that how it was 10 years ago?

The permission for microphone usage? Yes. The microphone permission was added in iOS 7 in 2013. On Google you can find timestamped references (on Stack Overflow, etc.) to the microphone permission that are more than 10 years old.

So you had a bold claim but didn’t put effort in to find commensurate evidence and it was clear to you.

But ended up making the correct decision.

Uhh not exactly… they aren’t listening to his microphone…

https://news.itsfoss.com/ad-company-listening-to-microphone/

That’s referring to a pitch deck from a marketing company and there is no hard evidence of it being anything more than marketing nonsense to drive sales.

Anything using the mic (on iOS at least) to “listen for keywords” would trigger the “glowing orange dot” indicator.

LinkedIn provides no mechanism to hide your profile from other members by default apart from an explicit block.

I was stalked on it by an unhinged bank employee, and even though he's blocked I still see people from his company have viewed my profile on a regular basis.

“Abuse early, abuse often” is the phrase used in video game culture for this concept. If a bug/loophole/opportunity exists, take advantage of it as much as possible before it’s fixed. Applying it to the real world feels slightly different though.

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