Re:LinkedIn shares drop 40%, erasing $10B of company's value
by kale on Friday February 05, 2016 @04:37PM
(#11044840)
ResearchGate seemed nice for a week. It showed every time a paper quoted one of mine, so it was a small confidence boost to know my older stuff is being read.
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.
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.