As a recovering academic, I find myself getting incredibly scummy e-mails from ResearchGate which actually purport to be from people I have done research with, putting their name as the sender, without that person even taking any action to send the e-mails. It's a spamming/phishing tactic that for some reason hasn't gotten them banned from the major e-mail services.
How do I know that the person named in the e-mail is not choosing to send these e-mails? Someone I once did research with passed away last year, sadly. He started supposedly sending me ResearchGate invitations six months after he died.
Then they sent an e-mail with pictures of me, and said "are any of these people you?" Apparently RG thinks I need a photo so bad, it tried to search for one on the internet, and asked for confirmation.
It's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it is creepy.
I deleted my LinkedIn account over five years ago, and hunted down every "no, really delete" option I could find on the site and in their emails. It didn't work. LinkedIn will still happily let users and recruiters find my old ghost profile and try to connect with it. I have quite a number of former co-workers who think they have a contact channel with me in LinkedIn even though it would never reach me. LinkedIn isn't just a nuisance, it's actively poisonous and dangerous.
I'll be doing all my future job hunting on StackOverflow Careers, thanks.
I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses.
Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"
So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.
[And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]
When I clicked connect, I thought I would invite her to my network, but it ended up with an invite to LinkedIn to her email.
The difference is that you were not aware of how interested in LinkedIn the contact was, and you were not aware you were ALSO inviting her to join LinkedIn
At this point, I honest /just/ /don't/ /know/ how to stop getting emails from them. In my entire life I've only had a facebook account for a few hours (created one out of necessity a few years ago -- closed it after just a few hours of use at that time). And I still get emails. I've clicked unsubscribed probably fifty times by now, but I still keep getting emails. I just don't know how to stop it. Incidentally this is one of the reasons I cheer for blackhats taking shots at Facebook, I'd love to see the behemoth shot down. They don't respect me or my time, I don't respect them.
Useless, of course. But just because they ignore internet norms of decent behavior doesn't mean I will.
This worked out fine for Facebook: I visit their webpage when I want to know what's going on over there, and they never send me email.
Also, if you're in the USA, you should report those messages to the FTC.
If you try to unsubscribe from an email list and your request is not honored, file a complaint with the FTC. via https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0038-spam
And I don't need any more luck; my initial problem is solved (I no longer see spam from Facebook, and I am taking steps to ensure they are aware of their problem, in case they weren't).
The problem was worth the time I spent on the config; it is manifestly a waste for me to involve the FTC, since I don't have to worry about Facebook's spam anymore and am willing to eat the tiny amount of bandwidth involved.
I think it's a bit extreme to cheer for hackers to take down a big company just because they send you a few emails. How much time has it really cost you, in total, to delete their emails? 5 minutes? And for that the "behemoth" should be "shot down?"
It really just isn't the emails, it's rather that they're one of the biggest pioneers of dark patterns: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebooks-evil-interfa...
I'm extremely conflicted about all of this. I want the open web to thrive, but I'm beginning to realize that in a free and open internet parasites who partake in these such practices are rewarded all too well.
It's really a shame but I think that when your business is built off of trying to monetize user engagement with ads and you're under the scrutiny of the public market it's only a matter of time before this starts to crop up. I imagine there are/were many people at all of these companies against this sort of thing but with enough employees and enough outside pressure to deliver growth I suspect it's nearly impossible to avoid (without an extremely explicit mandate from the top)
:(
It appears so. This is amusing to me -- because when I was involved in a startup setting 2 years ago, I remember distinctly having conversations with my coworkers about the frequency of emails we were sending. We argued against sending too many emails because it would waste the user's time, it wasn't right, etc. And in the end we followed through - we were very mindful of not bothering our users with anything other than what is very necessary and important. But Facebook et al. have more of a 'fuck the user' philosophy and they seem to be faring well for it. This is very much a trend, little players are playing strange tippy toe games while the big players selfishly and shamelessly mess it all for everyone.
That's close to the proportional death rate from air travel accidents (3.6 billion passengers/year, around 500 deaths).
Facebook takes---in Fermi numbers---about as many lives as plane crashes.
That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).
They're wasting 135 people's entire lives worth of time. Every single day. :(
Where are you getting that 1b number from? Most of Facebook's active users are presumably not receiving these emails or not being particularly enraged by them, since they like using Facebook.
Why the hyperbole?
Agree it's scummy and they are mixed in with actual folks on LinkedIn but they are not creating shadow profiles.