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Comment by seren | Hacker News Reader

Creepy experience from this week. We have hired someone for daycare, I only have exchanged a few mail with that person. And now, her husband is in "people I know".

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 ?

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> 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.

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.

Except the rest of us all hate those people. I guess maybe you're right that it works for them, but at the cost of real human relationships.

I don't understand what you're referring to. There are people I know who are better able to reach out to a friend of a friend when a certain question/need comes up because they're better at networking. Oftentimes at that time, more of a relationship is developed at that time. I don't see why you would hate someone like that...

In my opinion recommandations on LinkedIn are fairly trustworthy because:

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.

I'm always a bit surprised that people find this sort of thing to be creepy. It's done automatically at a large scale by an algorithm - I would bet that there isn't a single human being at LinkedIn who knows that this connection was made (or is even aware of your existence [sorry]).

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.

It is creepy in the sense that it reminds me that every action I am taking online is monitored. And in this particular instance, I don't perceive the added value. Basically when it is useful, it is cool, and when it is not, it is creepy.

An algorithm may be a piece of pure, abstract mathematics, but its use and implementation is still a product of human intent and societal construction.

She and/or her husband probably checked you out on LinkedIn, that's how he shows up in your 'people I know'. It's not really that creepy.

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.

He did not show up in the list of people that visited my profile. He could have done so anonymously though.

> I don't have shared my mail credentials with Linkedin, but I assume she has

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.

Wait, why can't the relationship just be:

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.

At some point Occam's razor comes into play.

Many email providers automatically add people you email to your contacts list. If you'd provided LinkedIn access to your contacts (which many providers do), then its not a surprise that LinkedIn recommended the non-existent person.

Did you use your own ip address to sign up to linkedin?

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