LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network
interactually.com
interactually.com
I'm not looking for a job, I'm not looking to connect with recruiters, and I really don't like the ability for one of my exes to publicly see where I'm working so that she can continue to harass me -- on the other hand, My LinkedIn Profile is around eight or nine years old at this point in time, and I've amassed a fair amount of connections, that I'd like to keep should I need to start looking for a job anytime soon. I wish that I could disable it, hiding it from search engines, recruiters, and anyone else who's looking for it, until I'm ready to start looking for a job without deleting every one of my connections and starting over.
You are the product, and allowing you to hide your profile makes you a less valuable product to the customers (recruiters). Until paying customers start complaining that their response rates are too low because there are too many inactive/unresponsive profiles, this won't happen.
I don't mind being connected with relevant offers, that's what I signed up for. But then there are those low rate recruiters sending shotgun requests, asking for connecting and then asking me to do their job (you know, that'if you know someone interested' part) with mass request that are not even close to my listed skillset.
I don't understand how people can benefit from employing them, if they can't even match skills too job most prospects sent to interviews will be a waste of time for both parties involved.
Just because a signal gets you some positive results, does not make it useful. You have to also look at the second-order effects. Does it creep out people? Does it make people less likely to use your service, thereby negating the positive effect of added connections?
I thought that was actually pretty scary - normally, if you're a service employee at a business, the most a customer is going to learn about you is the name printed on your name tag. In this case, after buying my coffee and going home, I was presented with the last names of these employees and whatever other information was publicly visible in their LinkedIn profiles.
- Recruiters sending unsolicited connections requests and spam,
- Lame articles on productivity ( "5 reasons you should do X", or "5 things billionaires do when Y" bla bla.)
- Who viewed your profile feature - seriously, things like this make people not click on other people's profile.
- All kinds of statistics on profile views that don't really mean anything of value.
- Thousands of collaboration groups that are completely inactive, so basically no community whatsoever.
I honestly think that the only reason they are still in business is because nobody came up with a superior product yet, and that makes me sad.
But perhaps the others did? If 'Steve Jacobs' imported his contacts and you exchanged emails with him, LinkedIn apparently becomes aware of that relationship. In fact:
> Tami has a total of 5 connections, lives in Seattle, no public company or title listed, but we just happened to exchange a few emails a couple days prior regarding some questions I had about software her company sold.
Tami probably used the imported contacts feature here, and that's how LinkedIn would know.
What you do online is in most cases not very private. Act accordingly.
I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has, and since we are both in her contact list, Linkedin assumed we know each other. It is somewhat correct but creepy nonetheless.
I am not going to add him but from my point of view, proposing you to add people you only know remotely diminishes the usefulness of the network. How can you trust the relation/recommendation/etc if you are connected to your second cousin's neighbor ?
The people I know who are the best at networking (I don't count myself in that class) are able to extract a remarkable amount of value out of contacts they only barely know or just have an indirect connection to. It might not be in your nature (or mine for that matter) to foster connections with people you don't really know, but it would arguably be beneficial to do so.
Having said that, I completely agree that "proposing you to add people you only know remotely diminishes the usefulness of the network". LinkedIn should really dial this back a bit.
0. they are redacted from logged-in accounts (while still possible I believe the risk of having an impersonator write someone's a recommandation is rather low, YMMV)
1. the relationship between the two is clearly stated
2. you are 1 click away from finding more about the person that wrote the review
It's arguable, but a recommandation on LinkedIn takes more work than a recommandation by phone. The words you say on LinkedIn tend to stay, and rather openly accessible.
Unfortunately that's not the case, and it's much darker than this.
Recently I was asked by a friend to open a profile for a non-existing character from her book. I had to create an email address to open a linkedin. A new email address. Never used. After creating profile I emailed this new account from my own email.
Week later my profile shows in character's "people you know", and also the character shows in my stream. Never had option to share contacts on with anyone as I oppose those that.
This situation proved to me that LinkedIn has to have some special deal with yahoo (at least) that they are gathering some extra data about people emailing each other. Otherwise there is no chance in hell that character's profile would guess me.
I'm not saying that yahoo provides a database of all your contacts to LinkedIn, but for example they can provide a streamline of md5 emails and then LinkedIn scrub it and match on their own.
There is something going on here much more advance than simple guessing who you may know.
you -> your friend -> a post your friend made with the name of the character -> the fictional character's profile
Getting Yahoo/email involved seems unnecessary to make the link.
Some time ago I was put on an assignment at another company, and suddenly people from that company started showing up in my 'people you may know' list. And vice versa probably, since I also checked out some of their profiles. This is just what people do these days when they get a job somewhere.
- My wife signed up for LinkedIn years ago with her work email but never added any connections. She got an email to her personal email address from LinkedIn saying "David Veldt is inviting you to join LinkedIn!" I have no permissions that I could find set to allow such a thing.
- Just in the past week, two people have requested to connect with me that I haven't seen in over 10 years and live a couple states away from. Our only "connection" is that we're Facebook friends. There's no way I'm in their contacts list. I find it highly unlikely that they've searched or viewed my profile because we have absolutely nothing in common.
- The thing lately that pisses me off the most is how much they're trying to get me to mindlessly give them access to my contact list. On the app, sometimes a screen pops up when I open it to "Find more connections" but turns out they want authorization for my address book. Same thing on the notifications; they show a notification in the connections icon which usually indicates someone wants to connect, but instead its just a generic "hey, we can find you more of these!" type of notification. Reminds me of the cartoons where the salesman keeps popping up from laundry hampers and behind trees.
Might be time for a follow-up article.
"Hey Bob, do you know why owls can turn their heads 270 degrees?"
"Uh, because they can't move their eyes?"
That's a Wildlife Biology endorsement right there.
I work in a remote office with a very small number of keep-to-themselves colleagues. It's very common to arrive, spend 9 hours working, and leave for home w/o any dialogue other than a polite "how's it going?". In other words the place is dead.
The sales force is scattered around the world & doesn't need a lot of hand-holding. Our marketplace is a relative backwater, so there's not a lot "churn" to keep things interesting. (I'm a product guy. Interaction is like breathing.)
The bottom line is that I find myself with a lot spare time to explore & learn. My first choices are HN & Feedly, but I do enjoy finding colleagues from prior jobs - and the occasional high school / college friend - on LI. It definitely serves a remote-networking purpose for me.
I'd argue that they've experienced substantial growth precisely because they overstep their bounds. They're actively rewarded for engaging in this kind of behavior, and they rarely (if ever) face any real consequences when they take it too far. And despite the occasional angry blog post, it will continue until there's some sort of mass exodus of users—and even that would most likely be brought on by simple network effects rather than any sort of collective concern for privacy.
http://www.interactually.com/linkedin-creepiest-social-netwo...
LinkedIn may use cookies and similar technologies
on third party sites to understand my browsing interests
and target ads and personalize services accordingly.
Original HN thread:
This is an amazing conclusion coming from a digital marketing consultant who's livelihood is based on the very principles that he's challenging. This is akin to a car salesman not realizing that many of the parts of the "American car" he's selling are probably not made in America.
Of course, I'm conflicted, building a cultural graph at www.somewhere.com rather than a social graph - I think those days are over.
I think the HN crowd wouldn't really care for its social aspects because the HN crowd's professional online social needs are more satisfied by the likes of HN, Github, Stackoverflow, and so on. However, I see a lot of professional discussions on there for people of other career paths.
It looks like LinkedIn is just moving into Experian's old office. I don't think the two companies are related.
Your friends looked you up on LinkedIn.
Would the same apply if the email you sent is "forwarded" automatically to another email address that you are unaware of?
Or by received headers you meant you get a reply back from the celebrity?
Yes, I received several replies back but that was the sole extent of our contact on the Internet or real life.
Received headers show the previous mail servers that the email passed through through on its way to you. There can be many; each server adds another.
See https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt § 3.6.7, "Trace fields" and Appendix A.4 for an example. (Or, press control-U in some mail clients to see the source of an email you received to see all the headers.)
My money is that they (the celebrity) viewed you on linkedin, and that is the data linkedin used to make the connection.
That's certainly what I do before replying to strangers, google them and look at things.