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Comment by NDizzle | Hacker News Reader

If we're trading stories about shady linkedin things, I want to participate!

While I have never synced any of my email addresses with linkedin, and I have always used the hidden craigslist email address when buying/selling things, linkedin currently wants me to connect with two different people that I have sold things to on craigslist.

I'm not even sure how that happens, especially since I use the craiglist-internal email for handling the transaction.

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The people who you sold stuffs to, they saw you on linkedin and tried to link you. Now here is the funny part - Linkedin asks them to enter your email id to confirm that they really know you. Bang... you receive mail on your craiglist email... Again, just a wild guess as I have received Linkedin mails on different mail ids including my official email id that I have not entered....

Lesson learnt. You dont need to share your information online. Your friends will do that for you. And some times, even people you thought know nothing about you will have that missing link that these companies can then use to join the dots .......

You probably replied to a craigslist email which used your real email address via reply-to field and they were using gmail which stored this information.

My current theory is that I gave him my phone number in one of the emails, but every email transaction was through the pseudo-anonymous craigslist email that is generated per listing.

He probably has a contact with that (now bad) email and my (still current) phone number. Which is my phone number on linkedin.

That kind of makes sense, but it still doesn't make me very happy about their methods.

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