Linkedin is so terribly evil these days.

I also see the shenanigans of adding new 'privacy' settings and setting them open by default. Another typical Microsoft ploy by the way.

They were evil before.

Previously they’d take your LinkedIn password and try using that to log in to your email account to grab your contacts.

This is a big thing, is there any evidence? Not implausible unfortunately…

This sounds absolutely insane.

Wasn't this also how some services would connect e.g. your bank accounts? They'd ask for your credentials and log into your bank to scrape its contents.

And I kinda get it, some services external to your bank can help you manage your finances etc. But it's why banks should offer APIs where the user can set limited and timed access to these services. In Europe this is PSD2 (Revised Payment Services Directive).

I think the key point is that they would take your Linkedin password and try to use that on your email without asking you, in case you reused passwords.

Ok I didn't know that. Very good point. Wow.

The linked wikipedia article below says that they asked you for your email password specifically -- is there any evidence that they would try to use your linkedin password itself?

This is how a load of emails were sent out from my Hotmail account to anyone I had ever contacted (including random websites) asking if I want to connect with them to Facebook. The onboarding seemed to imply it would just check to see if any of my contacts were already using facebook.

God damn this feature. About ten years ago I inadvertently did something in LinkedIn and ended up spamming everyone I knew with LinkedIn invites. It annoyed a lot of people.