LinkedIn lawsuit exposes amateur moves of ‘professional’ network

It isn’t bad enough we have to fret over Anonymous, Chinese cyber spies, and the NSA sticking their noses into our personal business. Now we have to worry about LinkedIn.

Last week four LinkedIn users in Los Angeles filed suit against the business social network, claiming among other things that LinkedIn has violated wiretap and electronic communications laws, invaded users’ privacy, and committed fraud.

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The complaint accuses LinkedIn of “breaking into its users’ third-party email accounts, downloading email addresses that appear in the account, and then sending out multiple reminder emails ostensibly on behalf of the user advertising LinkedIn to non-members.”

It also claims LinkedIn uses a new member’s logon info to “hack into the user’s external email account and extract email addresses” and that it uses names and photos of LinkedIn members in advertisements without their permission.

LinkedIn’s public response? About what you’d expect — in a company blog post, Senior Director of Litigation Blake Lawit writes:

The lawsuit alleges that we “break into” the email accounts of our members who choose to upload their email address books to LinkedIn. Quite simply, this is not true….

We do give you the choice to share your email contacts, so you can connect on LinkedIn with other professionals that you know and trust. We will continue to do everything we can to make our communications about how to do this as clear as possible.

Trial by ire

Is LinkedIn guilty of hacking? Not as I understand the definition of that word. Users give their permission for LinkedIn to perform such acts, though claiming that LinkedIn makes this “as clear as possible” strains the definition of both “clear” and “possible.”

Is LinkedIn guilty of spamming? That’s much closer to the truth.

Here are the facts.

1. When you log in, LinkedIn is absolutely shameless about pestering you to upload personal contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AOL, and any other email domain you may have. This doesn’t just happen the first time you join the network; it happens periodically every x number of times you log in. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve politely declined, but it’s probably in the hundreds. Yet the requests keep coming.

Dear LinkedIn: No really does mean no.

2. If you do finally give in and say yes or just aren’t paying very close attention, LinkedIn will ask if you want to connect with contacts who are on LinkedIn but not in your network, and to invite contacts who aren’t yet on LinkedIn to join the service. LinkedIn oh-so-helpfully preselects all of the names on the list. If you’re in a hurry and click “Add to Network,” you’ve just spammed all your contacts. You have to de-select the names and/or skip this step to avoid it.

3. The process is actually much sneakier. LinkedIn doesn’t send your contacts an email saying, “Joe Blow just gave us your email address and now we’re pestering you to sign up.” It sends an email asking your friends to “Confirm that you know Joe.” And if you ignore it, LinkedIn sends it two more times.

On the next screen your friends are prompted to enter a password and click a button to “Join Joe’s Network.” They’re now members of LinkedIn, even if they didn’t realize they were signing up and even if they bail out without adding more info to their profiles. This is how 12-year-olds end up with ghost LinkedIn accounts they didn’t intend to create.

Of course, your friends will be prompted to upload their address books, then their friends, and so on, ad nauseam. This is how LinkedIn ended up with more than 230 million accounts and a soaring stock valuation.

Sleazy riders

Is any of this illegal? Probably not. Sleazy? Definitely, yes. And the ooze doesn’t stop there.

LinkedIn endorsements are a running joke. You can endorse anyone in your network for almost any skill, regardless of whether they actually possess that skill or you know anything about it. I can’t imagine a single recruiter who takes them seriously. It’s just an excuse to get more people to log in to LinkedIn more often. Yet there’s no way to shut them off.

As I’ve noted here in the past, LinkedIn’s People You May Know feature does some disturbing behind-the-scenes data mining to determine connections between people, many of them total strangers. I’ve had far too many tenuous connections to people who suddenly show up in my PMYK list days after I sent them an email. I know I’m not alone in this.

And the “six people recently looked at your LinkedIn profile, but we’re only going to show you three of them unless you pony up $25 a month” feature is as creepy as it gets.

Frankly, I doubt that lawsuit has legs. But if it forces LinkedIn to clean up its act a little bit, then more power to them.

If LinkedIn wants to be the serious social network it claims to be, it needs to stop pestering people to upload their address books. It needs to let you turn off features that annoy you. It needs to be a lot more transparent about how it connects the dots between people. It needs to stop acting like a creepy spammer.

If you’re going to be the network for business professionals, then you should probably act like one.

Have you ever felt spammed or creeped out by LinkedIn? Spill the beans below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “LinkedIn lawsuit exposes amateur moves of ‘professional’ network,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.