The fact that they requested access to your email account should have been warning enough.
I personally see LinkedIn as horrible, and deleted my account long ago. They don't let you restrict who can view your profile, and they allow people to remain anonymous. For anyone who cares about Privacy, this should be a huge no-no.
However, I would claim the fully visible profile is actually a feature.
LinkdedIn is not Facebook. LinkedIn is a professional index, like the yellow pages, with the difference that the minimum inclusion is free.
with the exception that LI is a social network, where the goal is to interact, rate, and comment on different scenarios
You have deleted your account and clearly don't find LinkedIn useful.
Are you really surprised that you don't understand why people who do find LinkedIn useful (and there are large numbers) would use it the way they do?
The original commented suggested that they sent the email themselves as if it had come from the user, not merely setting Reply-To.
Why? Precisely because of this: there are lots of perfectly legitimate situations when a third party sends email on your behalf.
Moreover, if LinkedIn signs their outgoing emails with DKIM, that would be a positive signal for a spam filter (and e.g. Gmail would show such mail as "sent via LinkedIn" or something to that effect).
Although "there are lots of perfectly legitimate situations when a third party sends email on your behalf" strikes me as being rather wrong. I cannot think of a single reason why anyone else should be sending email that claims to be coming from my email address. Sending email that lists me as a reply-to, sure. But as the sender? Not a chance.
Like I've uploaded version 1 of the plans, added some notes and the system needs to send out an email to everyone, I did the action, it's coming from me, not the system.
There's a reason it's part of the spec.
However, all the clients says "why does this email come from [email protected], I want it to come from my email address, I'm sending it".
Yet LinkedIn goes far beyond that. LinkedIn is clearly engaging in "dark ui patterns", hoping to trick you into giving those keys (and using them too!) when you are not mindfull.
I honestly don't know what people are thinking while enabling that.
No, Seriously?
http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-give-us-your-email-passw...
I believe Facebook was the first site to ask users for their email passwords -- and to great effect, at least on their growth metrics.
Whoa, I just looked at the friend finder page and it still does that for some email providers: http://i.imgur.com/bC9xEEM.png
I do like LinkedIn as a professional network. It's helpful when going into meetings, I can check out the people's backgrounds and use that as added context / something to relate with. It's helpful when trying to figure out whether someone could be a good sales/biz dev opportunity based on their background and experience. If I trusted them more, I may consider integrating them more tightly with some of my sales funnel workflows - but for now, I will continue using them as a standalone tool.
The current version shows up when you click "Add Connections" but it used to be much more in-your-face.
At first, I was bewildered, then I realized it must be because theotherparty granted access to their contacts.
I think we need more advertisement of this terrible practice -- and or try to get google to aggressively block their access to do this sort of thing from your gmail, as what it is -- essentially a phishing/malware attack.
But, the thing they do that really bothers me, is to ask people endorse me for things, in a way that suggests I asked to be endorsed for those things. But I didn't. It just found words related to those in my profile. And people who like me or want to be helpful click OK to endorse me for shit that I have nothing to do with. Like ASP.net.
I just don't like that it makes people think I asked to be endorsed. For stuff I don't know and don't do.
Years ago, recruiting advice was insisting that a LinkedIn profile had become necessary. But even back then, the configuration / data sharing they insisted upon, and worse, the reporting on some of their bad (from my perspective, and also others') behaviour was just too much for me, and I stayed away.
I imagine much of what one gets through LinkedIn is akin to much of what one gets in the rest of the corporate world. A lot of BS, and you left at your own discretion to discern the truth -- such as it is and is reflected in that environment -- amidst all this.
P.S. I'll add that LinkedIn seems to have become a poster child -- albeit a lame-assed corporate one -- for "dark patterns".
Especially when that someone already has a bad reputation like linkedin has.
Oh, it's okay as long as they send messages to those contacts using their identity, so it's not traced back to you ...
I sent a message to support saying "I never gave you permission to do this" and they took the time to reply and say "yes you did".
In addition to being good practice in and of itself, Google is currently doing a promotion where they'll increase your Google Drive space by 2 GB if you go through their security checklist (see link below):
http://googledrive.blogspot.com/2015/02/safer-internet-day-2...
They sent me an email saying "There are 108 people you might want to connect with", so I click on view all and it shows a giant list of people with checkmarks by their names. Nice. I uncheck all of them, and scroll through checking a few folks who I want to network with (5 people in total). Click next, it takes me to a screen showing the 5 people and the banner clearly says "Send connection requests to these 5 people?". I click next.
The next screen says "Congratulations, we've sent connection requests to 300 people.". What the flying fuck? Ok, well that's a bummer but oh well, probably just a bug in their system. Then my inbox starts getting spammed with "I'm out of the office right now blah blah blah" from people who I don't even know who they are.
The assholes sent 300 people linkedin connection requests through my own personal gmail account. With zero warning whatsoever. That really pisses me off.
I like LinkedIn, it's a great networking tool, but they really need to stop doing this shit. Something similar happened a few years ago, but they only spammed people in my address book who were already members and the emails were sent by LinkedIn, not through my gmail account.
I've revoked LinkedIn's access to my gmail account. I regret ever enabling it in the first place. I recommend you do the same.
For those who don't know how: https://www.google.com/settings/security (click the view all button next to Apps and Websites).