alt Hacker NewsI used to have a LinkedIn account, a long time ago. To register I created an email address that was unique to LinkedIn, and pretty much unguessable ... certainly not amenable to a dictionary attack.
I ended up deciding that I was getting no value from the account, and I heard unpleasant things about the company, so I deleted the account.
Within hours I started to get spam to that unique email address.
It would be interesting to run a semi-controlled experiment to test whether this was a fluke, or if they leaked, sold, or otherwise lost control of my data. But absolutely I will not trust them with anything I want to keep private.
I do not trust LinkedIn to keep my data secure ... I believe they sold it.
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Linkedin has been breached a lot over time.
But I have such low faith in the platform that I would readily believe that once they think you're not going to continue adding value, they find unpleasant ways to extract the last bit of value that they reserve only for "ex"-users.
My assumption was that it was an intelligence platform first. Just like Skype, Microsoft decided to randomly buy it.
It amazing really. If you reached out to people and asked them for the information and graph that LinkedIn maintains, most employers would fire them.
LinkedIn has a wild past. I'm surprised that it seems like no one remembers. Scanning users e-mail inboxes, creating fake users, etc.
A LinkedIn account's sole purpose is publishing, dissemination, and advertising information about you and your company. Anything that you badly want to keep private certainly does not belong there, much like it does not belong to a large roadside billboard.
Otherwise, LinkedIn can be quite useful in searching for a job, researching a company, or getting to know potential coworkers or hires.
Email spam is, to my mind, an inevitability. You should expect waves of spam, no matter what address you use; your email provider should offer reasonable filtering of the spam. Using a unique un-guessable email address, like any security through obscurity, can only get you so far.
ofc it's sold. Take a look at this: https://www.rb2b.com/
It identifies users that visit your site and then shows their email, phone number and living place based on their Li profile ;))
It’s definitely not a fluke. I was getting between 20 and 30 spam emails per day. Simply out of curiosity I deleted my linkedin account and the spam abated. After a week the spam reduced to a trickle and now after a few months I only get a few spam emails per week. Shortly after discovering that LinkedIn was the problem I deleted Indeed as well. Indeed has a fairly robust data deletion program.
Remember when LinkedIn was condemned because they copied Gmail’s login page saying “Log in with Google”, then you entered your password, then they retrieved all your contacts, even the bank, the mailing lists, your ex, and spammed the hell out of them, saying things in your name in the style of “You haven’t joined in 5 days, I want you to subscribe” ?
It could be, but I think it's also as likely it was the scrapers treating that as a trigger event of some type. eg you got a job and might have regrets.
I also saw... not sure what to call them, but honeypot friend requests? I used to get regular requests from profiles I didn't recognize with a generic pretty woman (I'd assume stock photography). Since I ignored them, they would re-request on intervals that were exactly 90 or 180 days. I occasionally glanced at them and there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to their friends. I'd assume this was also some type of scraping, probably for friends-only profile data.
This is precisely why I give each website an alias such as [email protected]. If I start receiving spam to that address, I revoke the alias and name and shame the website online whenever I get the chance. Not that I would use LinkedIn anyway.
You can replace LinkedIn in your post with every social media etc company and it will ring as true as your current post
> It would be interesting to run a semi-controlled experiment to test whether this was a fluke, or if they leaked, sold, or otherwise lost control of my data.
Too much time / energy on your hands? You gave them a unique email ID (which is always the most sensible thing), that's it.
The non-sensible thing was to sign up kn the first place. Nobody needs these narcisstic, BS spewing pseudo-networking places.
This is a good example of why it's insane that nobody at Mozilla cares that they hire CEOs that have only a LinkedIn page. If you want to visit the website of the Mozilla CEO, you have to create an account and log in. No big deal if it's a CEO of a plastics manufacturing company, but when the mission is fighting against the behavior of companies like LinkedIn, it makes me wonder why Mozilla exists.