LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value

Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by vitd on Friday February 05, 2016 @12:09PM (#11042792)

Just curious - why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact. I've just manually connected with people I know. Whenever a service asks for my contacts, I know it's because they want to spam them.

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by jasode on Friday February 05, 2016 @12:22PM (#11042899)

Many people are literally tricked into uploading their contacts. Example with screenshots.[1] The UI/UX practice is called "dark patterns".

On a monthly basis, I get LinkedIn "invites" from friends who simply didn't understand LinkedIn's hostile and deceptive user interface. They think they're just importing their contacts to conveniently++ find existing profiles but in reality, they're unwittingly giving permission to LinkenIn to spam their address book to recruit new members.

You may be good at defensive web surfing to keep your contacts private but most others are not.

Btw, there was a previous discussion from Feb 2014 about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276032

[1]https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...

++ (understandably because they don't want to manually retype each contact name into Linkedin. Ain't nobody got time for that.)

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by Tepix on Friday February 05, 2016 @12:58PM (#11043246)

Nice link! I'm glad I haven't signed up yet. But then again, I don't use gmail either so importing the address book would be considerably more difficult.

I wonder if you can prevent them from stealing the address book if you install their Android app?

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by dave2000 on Friday February 05, 2016 @02:09PM (#11043797)

If people have my contacts details that's not really a problem for me. A friend once said he wasn't going to get a gmail account because he didn't want Google knowing all his contacts but Google already had them because they all had gmail accounts. The value of keeping other people's email addresses secret is overrated. Spam is a fraction of the problem it was 10 years ago and there's always filters.

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by nfoz on Friday February 05, 2016 @02:55PM (#11044136)

The "spam" we're talking about here is from LinkedIn itself. That is, you give them your contacts, and it will spam them to sign up too.

If gmail started emailing your friends because you used gmail, that would be a good reason to not use gmail.

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by dave2000 on Friday February 05, 2016 @03:00PM (#11044183)

I'm not saying gmail (google) spam people; i'm saying that not using gmail because you don't want google to know your contacts is silly. it doesn't matter if google knows that you, for instance, are in my contact list. they're not going to spam you. i'm not going to not use linkedin because i'm concerned you're going to get an email from them; that's your problem, and not really a problem at that. You just mark as spam and move on. It's hard to imagine a single person has even decided to not share their contact list with an app or service because they're concerned one of their contacts might get contacted by them.

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by jasode on Friday February 05, 2016 @03:36PM (#11044408)

> It's hard to imagine a single person has even decided to not share their contact list with an app or service because they're concerned one of their contacts might get contacted by them.

You seem to be a little out of touch here. There are several examples of people withholding their contacts list from services like LinkedIn right here in this thread. It's not hard to imagine at all -- just read the posts.

In fact, right above your post that you responded to, the hn user vitd wrote, "why did you give them your contacts? I've been on it for years and have never uploaded a single contact."

Lastly, you're trivializing the situation by suggesting that recipients just mark it as spam and move on. The issue is that LinkedIn deliberately crafted the emails with header "FROM: YOU" and your photo in the message body to make it look like you explicitly sent the email inviting them to join. It's clever social engineering so that the recipients harvested from your contacts list do not treat it as spam. Some recipients know the disguised nature of LinkedIn spam and know you didn't actually send it but many do not (especially older executives). In those cases, they think that you are one of those clueless flakes that signs people up for multi-level-marketing vitamins and vacation timeshares. People genuinely got embarrassed by LinkedIn's spam practices.

Enough people were angry about spam being sent behind their back that they sued LinkedIn: http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-settles-class-action...

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by pkaye on Friday February 05, 2016 @12:16PM (#11042845)

They have some tricks on how things are placed on your personal page so you accidentally import your contacts. I've almost done so a few times.

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by coldpie on Friday February 05, 2016 @07:03PM (#11045692)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. Don't you have to give them your gmail password or some other Google auth? That doesn't seem easy to do accidentally.

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by pkaye on Friday February 05, 2016 @08:08PM (#11045973)

Yes they need your password but they mix things in the UI making things close to each other, things pop in and out. Its basically a big trap trying to fish as much as they can from you. I don't even install their phone app knowing they will get access to my contacts.

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by SixSigma on Friday February 05, 2016 @03:26PM (#11044355)

I tried the android app, bam - all my contacts are now in "do you know", I thought it would be "click to upload contacts". mistake!

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Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value by rbancroft on Friday February 05, 2016 @08:14PM (#11046001)

The app came pre-installed on my sony xperia phone. Wasn't even given any reasonable warning about it.

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