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Comment by cag_ii | Hacker News Reader

According to "Pledge of Privacy"[1], no. It seems they will also modify your outgoing mail to remove the profile info.

So in addition to reading your incoming mail they can also modify your outgoing mail as well.

Suppose that user B gets mail from A, then forwards it to C. I'd see why this could be valuable info. for a company like this (and also has a high potential for abuse).

[1. https://intro.linkedin.com/micro/privacy ]

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Wow, it even says right there that if you forward or reply via a different account, the full content remains in the message (of course!). I'd imagine the same thing would happen if you moved the message from a folder in one imap account to a folder in another imap account. Nice.

My initial reaction to this blog post was basically revulsion on a gut level, but the more I think about it, the more my revulsion becomes justified on a rational level.

There are good ways to remove 95%+ of the content even if you forward/reply from a different account. We'll talk about this in an upcoming post.

95% != 100%.

So there's a nontrivial chance that if I'm connected to someone in LinkedIn whose profile is "private", then if I forward a message from him (containing this LinkedIn flair) to some third party (who is not connected to him), then I could expose his profile details to the third party? That's a privacy lawsuit just waiting to happen.

Every time I get an email from LinkedIn with updates on private profiles of people I am connected to I could forward that email to anyone, is that a privacy lawsuit waiting to happen too?

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