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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Remember when LinkedIn was condemned because they copied Gmail’s login page saying “Log in with Google”, then you entered your password, then they retrieved all your contacts, even the bank, the mailing lists, your ex, and spammed the hell out of them, saying things in your name in the style of “You haven’t joined in 5 days, I want you to subscribe” ?

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The original version of the LinkedIn mobile app uploaded your personal contacts stored on your smart phone and SIM to their server (to also "invite" them), without requesting user permission.

After that, I never installed it again (but too late), and I bought a second (non-smart) phone.

WhatsApp infamously did just that.

It vacuumed the contacts and spammed them with "Join me on WhatsApp". One of the reasons for their initial exponential growth.

Almost everything coming out of Silicon Valley has an unethical past(present?) if you look at it a bit more closely.

Venmo did this too

When I created an account on LinkedIn, a long time ago, I used the web. When it asked if I wanted to invite other people from my list of contacts, I clicked yes. I thought it would let me manually enter some contacts, or at worst, give me a list to choose from, with some kind of permissions prompt. Somehow, it accessed my entire Gmail contact list, and invited them all. My goodness, that was terrifying (I didn't even know it was possible) and embarrassing. Companies are not to be trusted, ever. Especially now, as they've proven for decades they have zero moral compass, and no qualms about abusing people for profit.

I don't know how they're still in business after that. They also had a massive data breach at one point.

Because super-majority doesn't really care if the product does what it's intended to in the end.

Do you have a reference with more information on that?

They used a legit google oauth but with broad rights. They did pull the contact and repeatedly spam them as personal emails. There were lawsuits.

On HN itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14277202

Confirmed 5 years later in media; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-20/linkedin-...

It's all documented on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn#Criticism_and_controv...

I remember boycotting them for many years after that, yes.

Now lots of contact forms (not even necessarily job related!) are treating it as a required field. Pretty distasteful situation.

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