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Comment by auctiontheory | Hacker News Reader

It's really not practical to stop doing business with every large company with whom you have a disagreement, especially when they are the dominant player in their industry. I'm sure most of us could find a nit to pick with both Apple and Microsoft, not to mention Google.

If you will never need LinkedIn, that's fine. If you might, then you're only hurting yourself.

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That's a pretty defeatist attitude. If nobody complains when companies do bad things, what incentive do they have to stop?

Complaining is one thing - do it, by all means.

Breaking off the business relationship is another thing altogether - it hurts you much more than it hurts the monopoly provider, and it weakens your ability to influence.

Honestly, LinkedIn wasn't providing me much utility anyway. Recruiter spam plus the occasional question from an ex-cow-orker who could find me with a Google search anyway.

It would be a harder choice if the business in question were providing a more valuable service. If I were a recruiter, or a freelancer who was constantly looking for jobs, then it would be harder to dump LinkedIn. I'd like to think I'd do it anyway on principle, though.

If you use it, and a few in your network use it too, it can be very useful, both to find opportunities and to see who might be available. Most people change jobs every few years, and this is just another data point used to stay informed. If you are a "lifer" somewhere, it is of no use. The level of spam I receive does not seem excessive. The service is free.

Because what you consider bad isn't necessarily bad.

Let's take your post at heart, and we'll ignore the part about phishing (ironic, considering your own site's setup).

Your assertion is mostly paranoia, what could happen, and what LinkedIn shouldn't do. LinkedIn should not ask for your email password, despite that being a way to access email. Now, I'm not suggesting you hand over your email password without thought, but you do hand out your email password.

You hand out your email password to any email client you choose to use, with the hope that it doesn't share out that password to anyone else. After all, just as a LinkedIn employee could steal your password, so could a Google or Apple employee as well. I mean, Google even asks for the password to other email accounts if you want to use Gmail for non-Gmail accounts. And let's hope that no browser is tracking anything. It might be open source, but have you checked the source code?

Sounds crazy.

So leave LinkedIn. But really, it's a rant, and not even a good rant at that. And we didn't even talk about glass houses.

I have a plain old Wordpress blog. What is it doing that you consider phishy? (Should I disable comments? I hardly get any anyway.)

It's your assertion that LinkedIn is trying to phish people, when phishing has a very real meaning. If that is phishing, then what you have displayed when someone goes to comment could be considered just as phishy. You have to remember, WordPress is not just an app that you can install, but it's also a hosted service. Your page has the WordPress logo on it, and it's asking to log in. Is someone supposed to use your site's u/p or the WordPress's hosted services credentials.

You don't intend to steal anything, but you could, making you just as guilty as LinkedIn. That is to say, not guilty of anything.

>If you will never need LinkedIn, that's fine. If you might, then you're only hurting yourself.

The point, I believe, is announcing the act in a public forum. Whether or not OP stops using LinkedIn is moot.

I have found it very easy to avoid doing business with LinkedIn. I deleted my account years ago and set up a mail rule such that anything coming from linkedin.com is junk. So far so good.

I have successfully avoided purchasing Apple products for a long time, and aside from a gift, haven't bought Microsoft software for a good decade. Google's not on my boycott list yet, but I won't hesitate to stop using all of their services (beyond that required for work) if I find it morally reprehensible to do otherwise.

Your laziness is not our laziness, and your apathy is not our apathy.

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