I think people have a right to expect "find contacts in your address book" not to mean "indiscriminately spam contacts in your address book", especially from a service marketing itself as being a professional network and whose user guidelines expressly forbid you from connecting with people you do not know. Its UI explicitly violates the guidelines it expects users to follow by defaulting to inviting people -thousands at once- and not asking you to confirm the nature of your relationship, never mind giving you the chance to personalise your email.

For that reason I've purposely avoided intentionally connecting my address book to LinkedIn (other than registering with a gmail contact address) and yet all its "suggested contacts" are clearly people I once shared gmail mailing lists with. It's clearly pretty aggressive about finding contacts in address books at one end or another.

It's not like the UI behaviour is consistent - sometimes clicking "connect" on an individual's profile allows you to edit a message before sending it, sometimes it sends the autoinvite email without further prompting (which is a great way to look like a dick to someone you haven't spoken with in three years). Sometimes if you choose not to edit an English message it decides to edit it for you, sending a user you've corresponded with elsewhere exclusively in English an invitation in German. Basically, if you designed a tool to help people piss off their business contacts, you'd probably come up with LinkedIn.

And yeah, some people don't know what browser tabs do. But it's not like LinkedIn has a visible "undo" feature...

Valid points, but they don't support the unnecessary flame bait in title. A virus is something completely different from an inconsistent UI.

And a viral pathogen is different from a computer virus, but that term has been adopted because it effectively used an existing term to clarify the behavior of an unfamiliar phenomenon. Like both, LinkedIn uses subterfuge to coerce a host into propagating it, often against the host's best interests.

The blogger and his intended audience likely know the dangers of biologic and technologic pathogens. I don't buy the "but I didn't know it was not a good idea to practice safe contact(s)".

There is a wider implication when people who should know better about safe practices don't apply a little common sense. Claiming "virus" in this case removes personal responsibility.

If someone savvy enough to blog about technology voluntarily exposes their contacts, how will the general public ever be expected to act in a safe manner and thus limit social engineered privacy and security breaches?

This, wait... no, sorry, not this. Joking aside; the first button is one that deselects all contacts and they mention the numbers of connections to be created right in the top. Here it is: http://i.imgur.com/3qiT140.jpg

I do hate LinkedIn but for very different reasons, like pretending is a safety measure to not connect with strangers and then charging you for a premium service for direct-emailing anyone you want.

Is "Add connections" the final step?

Granted it does allow you to deselect contacts and does (discreetly) indicate the interface is obscuring ~100 people it's defaulting sending invites to when you go to the next step, but you can understand why Joe VP might not expect clicking the blue button to send invitations to the mistress, disgruntled former employee and rival contractors who are hidden away somewhere near the bottom of the list.

My problem was that everything you need on that page is along the left-hand side. The number of contacts pre-selected is pretty small, and off to the right. I was breezing through this, trying to find old friends (and it worked! The first contact suggested was someone I've known for ten years), and I just missed that little number line on the upper right.

Ideally, it should throw up a warning for trying to add anything over maybe 50-100 accounts, like a simple "Are you sure Y/N?" before allowing you to continue adding that many.

This, this. Much of our Western culture is centered around the individual and their ideas which must be respected, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, if it's someone wearing hipster glasses.