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LinkedIn's sleazy invite tactics

14 points by codezy ↗ HN
The other day I popped on to LinkedIn to look at a profile and there was an input for my email and password, which I thought was weird as I thought I was logged in. Anyways, I entered my password and email again and hit OK. Well it turns out this was an import from contacts box that they just happened to make look very much like a login. Anyhow on the first screen it prompted me to invite some folks so I selected 3 of them and hit ok, thinking I was done that, I hit ok again accidentally, and low and behold, it emailed every single person that I had ever emailed. We are talking clients, co-workers, friends, even kids who had sent in support requests for one of our games. Now - I probably deserve some blame for not paying enough attention, but at the same point, why would you dress up some major function like this to look like a login box. So that was bad. But what is worse, it decided without asking me, to send yet another batch reminding people who had not signed up and there is no apparent way to turn this off. Anyhow, be warned. Not sure if this is worse than them defaulting to using your photos in ads

8 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 21.9 ms ] thread
singlow
> I probably deserve some blame for not paying enough > attention

Well, I have been annoyed by this before as well. While I would not blame you for not paying attention, I will blame you for something worse: using the same password on LinkedIn that you use for your email account.

_ud4a
hahahah we both posted the same comment at the same time! Kudos
_ud4a
what is bad is you using the same password for your email and linkedin account!!
dgunn
I had to report LinkedIn as spam in gmail because no amount of unsubscribing would stop them from spamming me. I have an account already but they refuse to leave me alone about it. Their tactics for most things are just sleazy. They only see their users as ways of getting more users. I'm not a fan. Although I still have an account, so I guess I'm not that upset.

LinkedIn should thank gmail for having such a good spam filter. Without it, they probably would have lost me as a user. :)

cmos
The exact same thing happened to me. Non technical family members whom I hadn't contacted in years were now excited to join this 'linkedin' thing. That goddam company made it look like I was reaching out to people I haven't talked to in years, creating awkward situations and making two weeks of my life far more stressful than they should have.

They even had some buttons to 'retract' the emails, but all those did was kill the link in all the emails sent out, creating another wave of emails from family members 'hey, the link is dead'.

I deleted my linkedin account and have not looked back. I strongly encourage everyone to do the same.

abbasmehdi
Have you noticed post-IPO and post acquisition products start to suck? Huffington Post used to be a favorite, until AOL took over. LinkedIn is turning into a spam machine.
km3k
So that's why I've been getting some random linkedin invites from people I don't remember or people I e-mailed once! Good to know I can ignore them.
notahacker
Yeah, my dad has spent the last few days incandescent with rage at a system which (presumably via deceptive opt in) seems to have emailed everyone he's ever been involved in email correspondence with, which he thinks includes a number of people on cc chains he doesn't even know.

So basically, instead of welcoming someone who fits smack bang in the middle of their ideal demographic (self-employed professional with specialist expertise and a lot of old contacts but no time or inclination to go to networking events) they've got a phantom account with over 100 connections but no intention of using the service ever again.

I remember another site that grew very big on this invite model. AOL wasted half a billion on Bebo.

Time to start shorting their stock whilst reporting their emails as spam.