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Comment by daviddaviddavid | Hacker News Reader

The "People You May Know" feature of LinkedIn is downright disturbing. Everyone in my third-party email's Address Book shows up as a person I may know. This includes people without LinkedIn accounts, people who've been dead for years that I never removed, people that I've only ever exchanged a single email with.

I never gave LinkedIn my email creds (I'm astounded that they have the gall to ask for my email password). Also, it is 100% inconceivable to me that all of these people would have given LinkedIn access to their email accounts.

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People without LinkedIn accounts? Are you quite certain? I worked at LinkedIn and know exactly how People You May Know used to work (I've looked at the code). Unless they changed something in the last couple years (and given their dev cycle, I doubt it), every single person who it recommends has signed up to LinkedIn. Of course, I heard people make these claims while I worked there too.

Also, it really isn't that hard to guess how it works (hint: are you sure you need every single person to give address books access to build a graph?).

My friends cats (who have email addresses but have never signed up on Linkedin) show up as "People You May Know."

Explain that one.

I think you should first explain why you're friends with someone who makes an email for their cat ;)

So they can get Facebook pages, duh.

Has your friend signed up to LinkedIn and let them have his or her contacts? What about all your friend's friends who have the cats in their contact lists?

She says no. And the cats don't email anyone.

How does she know? Maybe while she's out the cats email or even signed up for an account with linkedin? She should install a webcam to double check.

Cats prefer twitter.

Dude the cats hacked all the webcams ages ago. If they don't want you to see it you won't see it.

What an appropriate comment for your username. I'm still trying to figure out what LinkedIn have done to my email, but basically my wife and I are inundated with spam from them. It's non stop. I only signed up to learn more about the person who hit our car and has been slow to pay. It was helpful, but despite opting out of every option I could, somehow its learnt that my wife exists and is nailing us both with spam.

Apply a spam filter...?

It seems to be a recent feature. I recently started seeing my 10 year old cousin's email in the "People You May Know" section, and I'm fairly certain she has never signed up for LinkedIn.

Perhaps you could shed some light on my other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426192

If I click 'see more' under the 'people you may know' list on the homepage, fully half of the eight people above the fold are without LinkedIn accounts. These include family members who I can be certain don't have accounts. I assume clicking 'add to network' (rather than the 'connect' for those who do have accounts) would generate an invitation to join LinkedIn.

It suggests 'people' by email address that are my own. In the past I used gmail as a Dropbox together with a friend and it always shows name1 + name2 @ gmail.com as someone I might know. I'm pretty sure everyone involved has forgotten the password for that account.

If you are linked to 100 people on your LinkedIn account, and 10 of them have the same set of people in the address book they imported into LinkedIn, it's not hard for LI to figure out you might also know people in that overlapped set, and recommend them. You don't need to import your address book for this to work -- just enough of your connections, who have connections in common with you, need to do it.

Have you ever installed their mobile app?

I doubt they are using anyone's credentials without permission, or "hacking" accounts either, but their mobile apps do have full access to your contact list.

No, I have never installed their mobile app.

It isn't that they are stealing credentials on behalf of users; even today the UI is confusing and too verbose. It's clumsy. It's like reading credit card statements with tiny fonts. I am very caution about what I do on a web service but LinkedIn bit me once. If you happen to did one step wrong (even when you thought you override that decision already), LinkedIn will somehow send invite to everyone. Whatever the step might be or whatever bug there is. Just plain annoying. And this happens to many LinkedIn user on planet earth.

It may not be necessary for all those people to give LinkedIn access to their email address books. Say you're A and you see a suggestion for B. Maybe a mutual friend C uploaded their email address book, which includes both A and B in it, and LinkedIn's PYMK can use the feature "A and B have a mutual email-network-friend", which might be useful.

Given that email address books are really large, only a few of them might give lots of these sorts of second-order connections.

Second order connections on the LinkedIn network could be driving these recommendations too. People's friend-of-friends sets can be really large, like typically tens of thousands if I remember right...

> I never gave LinkedIn my email creds (I'm astounded that they have the gall to ask for my email password)

Well, why not? I've recently given in and created a Google account again; they're doing the same thing. I even had to confirm in a pop-up box that I really don't want to give them access to my emails. (And that I really don't want to follow celebrities on G+.)

I don't know why the EU goes after cookies but not after the practise of asking for email passwords.

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