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This same issue happened to me, including the unsolicited LinkedIn contact invitations.

Suffice to say that it is extremely embarrassing to not only send "connect requests" to people I barely (or don't at all) know, but also to people whom I am actively avoiding due to issues in real life.

I had to go through, check all my pending invitations, and rescind them. Not sure if that really helps, though, since then if they were to click "accept," it would simply say "no invitation to connect."

What a mess.

>My biggest gripe with LinkedIn is that recently, I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts. Getting suggestions for contacts who are already using LinkedIn was the intention but they invited anyone who had ever mailed me!

I sold a guy a couch on Craigslist in 2005 or 2006, and he must've uploaded his Gmail contacts to LinkedIn not too long afterward. I only know this because for the last six years or so, the "People You May Know" feature on LinkedIn has kept trying to get me to add him as an e-friend.

This has always interested me. I vaguely recall hearing somewhere that Gmail sells contact info to LinkedIn? Can anyone confirm or invalidate this?

I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.

I haven't heard that. I just assume that there are enough people out there that I've conversed with that have uploaded their own contact list to LinkedIn to find connections.

Gmail has/had that behavior where anyone you email ends up getting created as a contact, and in the early days it seemed a lot more aggressive as to when it would auto-add someone to the list. So there are a lot of people who have spurious entries in their contact lists.

I know it wasn't worth the time to me to clean the list, up until I bought an Android phone in 2010. So I had six years worth of auto-added contacts, going back to when I first got a gmail invite.

I have repeatedly authorized LinkedIn to look at my contacts and this has NEVER happened. I would bet money that you clicked through a series of screens too fast and didn't realize you were inviting everyone, even though it was clearly stated. That said, it still sucks, and I sympathize. The UX should ideally make it near impossible for anyone to ever accidentally spam every person they ever e-mailed.

On the flip side though, their "people you may know" feature is the best I have ever seen. Once you hook up Gmail once, it repeatedly checks it for new contacts, and thus always presents very relevant recommendations for who you might want to connect with whenever you are on the site. It's extremely frictionless.

I get invitations from strangers weekly, so even if it may be possible to not send invitations they're sure making it easy to do by accident.

This happened to me several years ago. I'm appalled they still do this! It's the main reason I deleted my account. For what it is worth, I've never once regretted deleting it.

Have you tried seeing if those auto-invites are in your invite outbox [1]? You might be able to cancel them. Then again maybe not, I've never used the contact integration feature.

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/inbox/invitations/sent

> I made the fatal mistake of letting it look at my Gmail contacts.

It still surprises me how many otherwise clued up people regularly do this sort of thing (it doesn't surprise me that the inexperienced masses do, but people who have some technical and/or business experience behind them should know enough to be more automatically cynical).

Far too many people are quiet happy to hand access to their accounts to third parties despite all the past occasions when this has turned out to have been a bad idea. Heck, you'll probably find that it is a direct violation of your terms of service with the email provider: many have clauses stipulating that you will not share your authentication credentials or otherwise allow 3rd party access under pain of account cancellation.

The other one I don't get is letting apps like facebook exist on a device that contains all your contacts without any control to stop them accessing said contacts. It isn't just that they can use them for behaviour that I consider spammy, there have been occasions where apps have corrupt a significant number of people's contacts list (like when facebook "accidentally" replaced many contacts email details with new "facebook" addresses, much to the irritation of those affected). I know people who get up in arms about the slightest hint of someone being interested in their personal details, who are happy to let any old developer/distributor of some free game or other such have full access to everything on their phones and don't see the cognitive disconnect they are experiencing.

The Facebook app is a tricky example, as it's the only piece of software capable of generating two-step authentication tokens for Facebook.

I've wondered for a while whether that was done as a strategic move specifically to pressure the "clued up" demographic into installing the app. It certainly worked on me.

Same here. After closing my account I was still receiving reminders of invites I got. I had to use a web form to ask them to stop sending me emails. It was quite disturbing to see how hard they tried to cling on my data.

I get two or three of those emails a year because of people who can't really 'work' linked in. So I just flag them all as spam, because that's what they basically are.

It's particularly fun when you have people's pagers in your gmail contacts.