I've had the same experience. Register on LinkedIn, log in, "Would you like to connect with <screwed up relationship from years ago>?" We hadn't spoken in years or connected on any other site, I could only come up with one thing: she emailed me once. I bet she gave LinkedIn her email credentials to find connections. I hate that feature.
I always had the same hypothesis as to how they were able to find those random connections. Which is why I refuse to give any social network access to my email contact list. For my own privacy and for my contacts privacy.
Yeah this really highlighted to me the inherent danger of social computing - I can be as private as I want, but I'm only as private as my real life friends are about me. I don't have to upload my email contacts for third parties to find out all sorts of interesting things about who I talk to.
I actually avoid being in photos at parties and events these days thanks to this risk. Facial recognition creeps me the hell out, and no one can seem to stop putting squares and names around everyone's faces when they upload photos (what are you gaining by this????).
Gonna be fun times when everyone has Google Glass and that data leaks or, more likely, continues to be volunteered by others without my consent.
Yup. Read an article the other day that police cars in some US cities drives around continously scanning license plates with topmounted cameras. Given Moore's law, I suppose they will sooner or later have the computanional power to be able to expand that to realtime facial scanning too.
I was thinking the exact same thing. It's funny that he wrote that entire post and never raised the possibility of OTHER people sharing their contacts with LinkedIn, and that may explain at least some of the "people you may know."
You're right, I hadn't thought about that. The first person that commented on the blog pointed it out. You're also right, however, that it only explains some of the suggestions they made. It still doesn't explain some of the others, and they still don't make any mention of that in their Help page explaining where they get the data from.
It's using a different name; I don't think I have a location set; and the only similar interest would be League of Legends, since I created the account initially just to get the free promo.
The only thing I can think of is that it's matching IP addresses and concluding my two accounts are the same account.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how well separated I kept those, so it could have been cookies linking the accounts. (I did this way back in 2010, so my memory is fuzzy.)
I always assumed the suggestions were from other people importing their Twitters and email contacts. So if person A emails me and then imports their emails, Linkedin can suggest to both of us that we might know each other, increasing the chance of creating a connection (and creepy-ness factor for me).
Twitter is more interesting in this case because it allows unilateral following. So even if you broke it off with a now ex-girlfriend if they were still (or even only now) following you on Twitter that graph might make indicate the awareness.
I'm pretty sure that's the case. I got suggestions for 2 people I played WoW with and the only ways we communicated were in-game chat, voice chat, and we had a single e-mail chain where we (the officers) talked about....something, I forget what. I'm guessing one of them imported their mail contacts because I doubt LinkedIn has visibility into Blizzard's social network or private voice chat servers.
I think the creepy part about LinkedIn is you can actually see who views who. If Facebook did that it would be very embarrassing for a lot of people.
The automatic links are one of the reasons I don't use LinkedIn. I have worked at places with people that I do not under any circumstances want to be associated with. I work in a completely different city now and will be moving to another town, which will make as clean a break from them as possible. A social network continuing to track that is a significant issue.
I appreciate your insinuation about my "likes". I don't really have anything "liked" on my Facebook but please, go ahead and tell me about how my personal preferences are affecting my online experience.
I'm happy that your anecdotal experience was different from mine, but your empirical evidence does not undermine mine.
Facebook tends to base these ads around collected data and demographics, the targeting is not generally random. Perhaps other sites you've browsed that share data with Facebook's advertising network?
I suppose there's also the possibility of malware replacing FB's ads with their own.
I find it interesting that it has automated what some folks have done on their own for years. There was a woman at Netapp who managed these sorts of potential and known relationships in her head about the folks working at a couple of big Netapp customers.
I guess what I find amusing is that it is was my experience when introducing myself to someone new at a social event and saying "I work at <company>" or "Yeah, I grew up in Las Vegas" or something along those lines I would often get "Really, I knew this person <name> who worked/lived there, did you know them?" as social banter. It didn't creep me out then either, but I'm sure that for some folks it does.
LinkedIn recently suggested my neighbor from 1995. I didn't even have Internet access, let alone an email address back then. I haven't had any contact with this person since.
Why would it be creepy for someone using a social networking site to search for people they've met over the years?
Also, how much of the perceived "creepiness" of someone searching for someone on LinkedIn just a variation of this: http://thedoghousediaries.com/1042 ?
That or they have information on where you and your neighbor once lived. I have signed up for a couple of online brokerage accounts where they ask me questions about where I or my family have lived in the past.
I got questions like; "At which of these 5 addresses has $BROTHER ever lived before?" And one of them was correct.
Facebook does the same thing and it's just as creepy.
I closed my "real" account around 2011. A few months back I created a new blank account because I needed access to a couple organization's pages. The only information on that account is my name (a fairly common one) and an email address which is different from the one on my original account. It's possible they have some geographic info linking the two accounts as I closed and opened them from the same city.
90% of the "people you may know" are correct and from dramatically different social groups. Some how it's picked out a girl I did a family stay with in Germany in '04, a fourth cousin I'm only vaguely aware of, current friends from several groups, and high school friends I haven't talked to in 10 years.
I set up a test Facebook account while doing a Facebook app that uses an e-mail address that has never been used for anything else.
Yet it keeps suggesting people I actually know.
The second account also does not have my full name (if it had my full name it'd be less weird, as my name to my knowledge is globally unique - there's only a few hundred people with my last name worldwide)
The account has not been used for anything related to me. I've never searched for anyone from it. Never given my e-mail address there...
The only thing connecting the two is that the "fake" e-mail address is a "real-user-part+something@gmail.com" address, and that I've logged in to them from the same machine.
It took less than a day before that account started getting friend requests from people I know (clearly the "TEST" instead of my surname did nothing to dissuade them)
If you can't log into Facebook from a public/shared computer without them disclosing your relationships to everyone else who uses that computer, they should make that very very clear.
I'm sure this is the case. They probably keep track of all the accounts that have been logged into from your computer via a cookie, and then suggest friends based on those accounts. Creepy, but understandable.
> The only thing connecting the two is that the "fake" e-mail address is a "real-user-part+something@gmail.com" address, and that I've logged in to them from the same machine.
So, to summarize, a simple regular expression matching emails against /\+[^@]+/ and replacing with '' is some 1984-level creepiness?
The technology to do any of those is little more than a few database joins and some fuzzier matching logic like you are suggesting. What's creepy is just the extent to which they match. In the email contacts theory, for example, it's not hard to remember an email address that was in a user's contacts list and then suggest they connect when that email address is used. It's only creepy because you personally had no control over giving them the information that allows them to make that leap.
My guess is that the same machine is a big giveaway. There's a difference between leaving a trace of your presence on a shared computer accessed by many people and a computer accessed by one or two.
However, if people you know found the account, then that's also something that Facebook uses - I've had "do you know X?" suggestions from people with whom I have no traceable connections (not in my address book, don't even know their email addresses) - turns out (when I asked one of them) that he had been looking at my profile (without friend-requesting me) a few days before.
What is worse is that
1. There is no way to actually delete the data. From what I can see, they only disable the account if you ask them to delete.
2. Even if you didn't give any of your data to FB, your friends/family etc can - there is simply no way to prevent this (a friend takes a picture of you at a party, tags it with your name etc)
I suspect LinkedIn remembers people who looked for you but didn't try to connect, or you didn't have an account at the time. It has definitely suggested that I connect with the odd stalker with whom I have no other ties...
Are you logging in from the same locality, perhaps the same building, perhaps from the same computer and perhaps still using the same IP as you had when you closed your account in 2011? It doesn't take a lot of work to come up with some new-user-matching-old-user algorithm with a decent success rate using geographic/IP data.
It would have been the same major metro area, but moved about 8 miles in the middle. Same ISP, different IP. Same computer, but there's no way I didn't completely clear the browser a few times in those 2 years.
This profile was a "fake profile" of a person I knew, from the description it was clear it was this person, can't tell which email was being used, and if I remember correctly it had no friends as well (or maybe only one unrelated friend)
Most of that knowledge is likely due to people importing their address books. From there they can link you to other email addresses and combine the identities. Creepy yes, but relatively easy to explain.
Yeah, I've noticed that quite often. If you happen onto the profile of pretty much any woman that's above average attractive (and quite a few that aren't) you get that. I don't think the same is case for the men, though perhaps I'm just blind to what women finds attractive in men...
I used to get really upset at the large number of local recruiting firms that used a revolving door of attractive women fresh out of college to work as external recruiters. They were energetic, friendly, and it's a lot harder to say no to a sales pitch when they're at your office door and smiling.
Now I can see that there's a secondary use for an attractive LinkedIn profile picture as well. That might have a lot more leverage than cold-calling offices these days.
I'm not sure how much one should read into that. I mean, ok, there are probably some guys (and some women, as far as that goes) who click on profiles solely due to the attractiveness of the picture. BUT... there are other reasonable reasons to explain a picture like shown above. For example, note that all of the people listed appear to work in related domains (marketing, event management of some sort). Given the nature of linkedin (business networking, with a heavy emphasis on recruiting) it makes sense that somebody looking to, say, poach an event planner or marketing person, would look at those profiles. And, from what I've seen, those are a couple of domains where women are heavily represented. Recruiting is another one.
Anyway, just as a little anecdotal test, I just logged into LinkedIn and looked at two profiles, both attractive women, where one is a recruiter and the other is a developer. In the recruiter case, every single entry in the "people also viewed" list was female (and also a recruiter), in the case of the developer they were almost completely male (with two exceptions) and are either developers or work for the same company.
I don't know... maybe this is indicative of something that should be considered "creepy" but I have my doubts.
Further, there tends to be a high correlation between someone's success in a field such as marketing and recruiting, and their appearance. I don't want to generalize too much, but most recruiter emails I get are from very attractive women, and I have a feeling that's not unintentional, as gross as that sounds.
Yeah. I guess it says something about society, human nature, etc., but I think you're right. Heck, I can't even remember ever meeting a female recruiter who wasn't at least moderately attractive. And most of the women I've met, who were recruiters, are what I'd describe as flat-out "gorgeous" or "beautiful".
So... are attractive women particularly drawn to recruiting for some reason, or is physical appearance a hiring criteria for recruiting companies? Both? Neither?
I know a woman who was thinking of joining tech recruiting, and she asked me about it. She went for an interview, and most of the to-be co-workers were young women, and also attractive. It seemed like one of the requirements though it wasn't explicitly stated.
She was interested in it primarily for the pay; they were promising something like 45-60k a year, and her current position was only around $30k. You start off as a recruiter, and then you move up into account management, which is better pay and a larger budget for wining and dining clients.
I've noticed that the "LinkedIn Updates" email spam tend to heavily feature a few attractive women than I worked with some time ago. I strongly suspect Linkedin is using these women's photos to bait people into clicking through to the site (and thus show up in the 'people also viewed' list).
All of those people appear to be in the Washington DC area. It is possible they are all in the same social circle in which case, it would make complete sense they would all be viewed as a group.
For a while, Linked in was present a password input box that looked like "You failed to login, try again" at a glance, but in reality it was asking for your email address and password. From that point, they could read your email and extract all your contacts.
Here are some things I find more creepy about LinkedIn:
-It tells people when I view their profile. So now I never view people's profiles because I don't want to look like a stalker. Imagine if Facebook worked this way.
-An andecdote, but maybe you've experienced it: a guy I worked with about 3 years ago (and only for 2 weeks) has "endorsed" me several times recently. I don't know if this is some kind of quid pro quo, but it makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
You can disable the option in your profile settings to not show when you've viewed someones contact info, however, this means you'll no longer know who the people are the view your profile.
In fact, Facebook does quite the opposite - there's always been demand for "see who looked at your profile" apps on Facebook, and Facebook has always gone out of their way to squash them. It's something they most certainly don't want to happen on their platform, with good reason.
You can bet Facebook is storing that data though. And who knows what the future holds, perhaps Facebook will be forced to sell that data to its users in order to increase revenue and make stock holders content?
To be clear, it seems that the data exposed in this way is only affected by your own actions; i.e. it does not tell you who has been stalking you, just who you've been stalking.
A social network I used in eastern Europe would allow you to see people who viewed your profile if you paid a small transaction via SMS/phonebill. The functionality would last a month, I think. I thought that this was genius from a "how do we make money" standpoint, and all of my friends used it. Could you imagine the revenue possibilities for Facebook?
Yeah, didn't know that. Actually, what I especially found interesting was the dead-easy way of paying via your phone bill. I don't see that much here in the States.
You can turn off your visibility when browsing other people's profiles. By default, it should be anonymized anyway, unless you switched it when trying to view profile stats:
Personally I keep mine fully on since it is a good way of passive contact (I once browsed ~1000 VCs with a headline that was somewhat provocative as an experiment and about half looked at my profile back and 6 of them emailed me asking what I was working on).
Note: I actually designed this feature at LinkedIn after doing a ton of interviews with people and going to multiple privacy organizations and the EU to make sure it wasn't violating anyone's privacy by making it a tit-for-tat system that was by default anonymized (if you click on profile stats, it prompts you to switch your setting if you want to see who has viewed your profile (or did when I was there)).
Thank you for the link. I'm surprised I haven't found earlier on my own. The only problem is though, it says it will disable Profile Stats (meaning that you can't tell who's been looking at your profile). I guess I don't really need that anyway.
I'm not sure exactly which accounts premium accounts can see have viewed their profile, but pretty sure all free accounts are included. Will get someone who has setting on anonymous to view my profile later and check, but for now there's only a couple of hidden names on there, looks like people who are more than 3 degrees away.
The "who has viewed your profile" feature leads to epic lulz. There is this forum on the internet that is full or racists, misogynists, and homophobes (and is tangentially useful for getting legal industry gossip). A major troll posted a link to a fake Linked-In page (under his control) with a comment along the lines of: "how did this person get this job with such a shitty resume" (or something like that). When people clicked on the link, if they had been logged onto their Linked-In, their real identity was revealed to the troll, who proceeded to out everyone on the forum. Hilarity ensued.
Hrm. That shouldn't work unless they are within three degrees of the person. Or at least, it didn't work when I was there. Views to people's public profiles weren't recorded and there is no automatic redirect to their private profile.
Links to people's private profiles have an auth token in it that is good only for the account that generated it, so unless you're relatively closely connected, you can't actually view links to random private profiles posted by people on the internet.
I just did a test and opened LinkedIn and took a look at the suggested people.
They included: Several people with the same name as I (expected, not really creepy).
But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now. Also I doubt they remember me to search me, I am not much remarkable.
People that I met at school and church 6, 7 years ago, and that again, I never exchanged electronic messages with them.
I am curious why this is supposedly creepy. I think the main premise of a social network is that you reach out or get reached out to people who might know you or you might know. Now, you have the option of not reaching out to those people, and I think it is fair game that the social network assumes that other members might reach out to you, a member of the network.
If you do not like that aspect of the social network, do not join it.
Educated guesses are one thing; exact "guesses" are quite another, and one has to wonder where the 'guessing' is pulling its data.
Would it creep you out if I guess which month you were born in? Probably not.
Would it creep you out if I guessed your exact birthday, including month/day/year? Hell yeah it would.
It has nothing to do with whether or not one wants to be social, and everything to do with random, axe-murderer creepiness. Imagine if I walked up to you at a party and rattled off names of 5 random people from different aspects of your life; would that not freak you out? "Oh, you don't know me, but I know you ;)". That's virtually the same thing that is happening here.
But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now.
Well, if your instructor kept emails of all students in his personal address book, and he happened to share it with LinkedIn, then LinkedIn may deduce that each person on the list may be somehow connected to each other.
The contact-address-book-thing works both ways, I believe. If YOU let them access your contacts, or if anyone who's contact book you are in lets LinkedIn access their contacts, they will pop up on "People You May Know"
I think we all don't want to admit that we look up ex-girlfriends, neighbors, college roommates, etc. when we're on these social networks and we're bored (or lonely).
I searched for an ex once on LinkedIn and found nothing...until a year later when she finally signed on and there she was in my "you might know" suggestion list.
I routinely get suggested to connect with people I've never even emailed or who used email account I closed a decade ago.
It's reasons like this I wish someone would do a Public/Private key based p2p social network. Essentially you digitally sign a key that you know someone and that's how you derive connections. Seems like you could implement browsable profiles as well.
Its a great idea, but I think everyone who has had it is stopped when they look at just how unwilling people are to exchange keys (or understand them) and how unwilling browser companies are to put effort into interfaces for managing keys (both of these obviously feed into each other).
The type of user who uses public keys usually knows better than to use server-side key management on a social networking site (however pretty the interface may be.)
Oh definitely, that's why I highlighted the lack of innovation in browsers for handling keys and encryption/decryption. This all needs to happen locally (not the trendy thing these days) and the current tools aren't at the level where that's going to happen at a large scale.
There would still be the key-exchange problem (I can't imagine a system that would make it easy for non-technical people to exchange keys out of band, even if you could explain why that was necessary and what it means), but with good browser tools I bet the number of zero-knowledge type sites/p2p networks would explode.
I think if you take away the need to it to be really truly secure it's workable. Social profiles aren't nuclear secrets, they are just posts about topics and pictures. I think if you embed the private key with a symmetric key password that would be good enough. I do wonder why that hasn't been done especially in the era of native mobile apps.
I'm usually pretty careful about picking technologies and websites to use. I've steered clear of linkedin and as time goes on, I'm pretty happy with that decision.
There's a more benign answer to the creepy connection suggestions. LOTS of people import their email address books into linkedin. It's not a stretch to think that his girlfriend's mother (or some other relative) imported her address book that contained the names of both the OP and the girlfriend's stepfather.
As far as the creepier name mismatches go, my oldest email address list has tons of maiden names and unused/defunct email addresses. It's likely that some high school friend of the OP uploaded an old address book and LinkedIn's algorithm made a best effort match on some of the rarer names even if the email addresses don't match. I mean, how many Lucy Hatsbaughs do you think there are on linked in? Two? LinkedIn may as well gamble on odds like that.
I didn't import anything to LinkedIn. One person showed up on mine who could only have come from either my Twitter account or G+ account, both of which have been deleted.
Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.
I guess that's possible, but unlikely. I'm looking at it now, she's still there and so is a girl I had a crush on in junior high. This is fascinating but extremely disturbing, I'm deleting this thing asap. I figure I must have googled her and found her LinkedIn page while signed in, it could have been years ago. In fact that's got to be the explanation for both of them unless they did something extremely unethical with the email address I gave them.
I'm saying that I think the other person may have uploaded their contacts and then chosen not to send you a friend request or there's someone follows both you and the other person on twitter. In order to build long lists of suggestions, LinkedIn probably has to make some pretty big leaps of logic.
But, other posters have done some anonymous experiments that suggest there's something else going on, perhaps with cookies from other sites or IP addresses. I'm not sure how we'd figure it out, though.
>> Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.
This. The email address I signed up with used to be on a mailing list in another country I lived briefly in, including many people I'd lost touch with and some I'd never met. LinkedIn suggested all of them were contacts (at least until I built something resembling an actual network)
I didn't import my address book, but the most logical suggestion is they imported theirs and LinkedIn did an ultra-simple matchup.
This relates to something I noticed recently. Out of the blue, I started receiving "join my network" requests from people whose names sounded vaguely familiar. I couldn't remember ever meeting them, and their profiles didn't give me any clues as to where I might know them from. I searched the inbox of the email account associated with my LinkedIn profile, and it turns out that they were all people I had contacted about items for sale on craigslist.
So, I'm guessing that my address was somehow added to their address books, which they then imported, and that's how LinkedIn identified out "connection". What that doesn't explain, though, is why these invitations were sent out. I'm confident that none of these people would have knowingly sent an invitation to me, so I'm guessing that LinkedIn is obtaining their "consent" without making it clear what is going on.
If anybody understands the process behind this, I'd be glad to know. The sad part is that once I realized who these people were and that they almost certainly didn't intend to send invitations to me, I didn't bother to investigate any further, because that's the kind of thing I've come to expect.
People forget about the amount of data LinkedIn has available to them: ConnectedHQ (the predecessor to LinkedIn Contacts) has direct access to thousands of email inboxes, Rapportive can log any time someone hovers over a new address, and millions of connections have been gleaned through 'import your contacts'.
If you really want to talk about creepy, I'm fairly sure they use your IP address to match against other people who live/work at the same location: when I created a test account with dummy information, the first contacts that were suggested to me were my roommates.
I see LinkedIn as something akin to going to networking events. They really really want you to network, and they make some reasonable assumptions about your inhibitions. That's what their paying customers are there for.
Update: Creepy. But I think most of this data can be lifted from other users who imported contacts from GMail. I think they must be matching only by name, because people could have been in touch with different mail addresses (at a previous employer, for instance).
The OP site is down so I don't know what they are citing as "creepy"... but I never considered LinkedIn to be a social network. It has always just been a professional network. It is my always on, mostly up to date resume. It has the who/what/where/when of my employment history. I have only accepted connections from people that I have worked with (and even then only those I actually worked with... not just anyone that worked at the same company but does not actually know me in some way) or friends that are in similar fields (and the rare cases of recruiters I've dealt with regarding employment). It actually bothers me that people use it to post twitter/facebook style status updates. LinkedIn is the last place I would think to read about someone's breakfast choice... but I've seen those updates before.
I get far more quality recruiters contacting me that I ever have from sites like Monster, most of the ones on LinkedIn know the difference between Java and JavaScript and they don't take the one line in my history 5 years ago that said I helped build a printer script in C# that was used by a clients SAP system to mean I have 15 years SAP experience.
The value I get from it is mostly gathering intelligence about companies (e.g. size, new hires/leaves, key people in similar roles, etc), much less about actual "socializing". I very rarely initiate a connection, most of my (double digit only) contacts are by accepting invitations.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadGonna be fun times when everyone has Google Glass and that data leaks or, more likely, continues to be volunteered by others without my consent.
The only thing I can think of is that it's matching IP addresses and concluding my two accounts are the same account.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how well separated I kept those, so it could have been cookies linking the accounts. (I did this way back in 2010, so my memory is fuzzy.)
I think the creepy part about LinkedIn is you can actually see who views who. If Facebook did that it would be very embarrassing for a lot of people.
Is it any creepier than being able to stalk some stranger's Facebook profile anonymously?
I'm guessing the "likes" you have that cause the targeted ads to hone in on you would also make many folks blush.
At least, before I shut mine down some months ago, I had plenty of interesting likes but I never had any ads that didn't match my content.
I'm happy that your anecdotal experience was different from mine, but your empirical evidence does not undermine mine.
Good day sir.
I suppose there's also the possibility of malware replacing FB's ads with their own.
I find it interesting that it has automated what some folks have done on their own for years. There was a woman at Netapp who managed these sorts of potential and known relationships in her head about the folks working at a couple of big Netapp customers.
I guess what I find amusing is that it is was my experience when introducing myself to someone new at a social event and saying "I work at <company>" or "Yeah, I grew up in Las Vegas" or something along those lines I would often get "Really, I knew this person <name> who worked/lived there, did you know them?" as social banter. It didn't creep me out then either, but I'm sure that for some folks it does.
Also, how much of the perceived "creepiness" of someone searching for someone on LinkedIn just a variation of this: http://thedoghousediaries.com/1042 ?
I got questions like; "At which of these 5 addresses has $BROTHER ever lived before?" And one of them was correct.
I closed my "real" account around 2011. A few months back I created a new blank account because I needed access to a couple organization's pages. The only information on that account is my name (a fairly common one) and an email address which is different from the one on my original account. It's possible they have some geographic info linking the two accounts as I closed and opened them from the same city.
90% of the "people you may know" are correct and from dramatically different social groups. Some how it's picked out a girl I did a family stay with in Germany in '04, a fourth cousin I'm only vaguely aware of, current friends from several groups, and high school friends I haven't talked to in 10 years.
Yet it keeps suggesting people I actually know.
The second account also does not have my full name (if it had my full name it'd be less weird, as my name to my knowledge is globally unique - there's only a few hundred people with my last name worldwide)
The account has not been used for anything related to me. I've never searched for anyone from it. Never given my e-mail address there...
The only thing connecting the two is that the "fake" e-mail address is a "real-user-part+something@gmail.com" address, and that I've logged in to them from the same machine.
It took less than a day before that account started getting friend requests from people I know (clearly the "TEST" instead of my surname did nothing to dissuade them)
Wouldn't that be a dead giveaway?
If not the machine, then surely this.
It's amazing how much the marketting networks can figure out about you, and keep track of you with a cookie.
So, to summarize, a simple regular expression matching emails against /\+[^@]+/ and replacing with '' is some 1984-level creepiness?
Come on.
However, if people you know found the account, then that's also something that Facebook uses - I've had "do you know X?" suggestions from people with whom I have no traceable connections (not in my address book, don't even know their email addresses) - turns out (when I asked one of them) that he had been looking at my profile (without friend-requesting me) a few days before.
What is worse is that 1. There is no way to actually delete the data. From what I can see, they only disable the account if you ask them to delete. 2. Even if you didn't give any of your data to FB, your friends/family etc can - there is simply no way to prevent this (a friend takes a picture of you at a party, tags it with your name etc)
Or maybe Facebook is using a real-life https://panopticlick.eff.org/
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
It pointed to me that I probably knew a profile.
This profile was a "fake profile" of a person I knew, from the description it was clear it was this person, can't tell which email was being used, and if I remember correctly it had no friends as well (or maybe only one unrelated friend)
https://twitter.com/joelandren/status/251417778643406848
If I were a woman, I would be turned off to see something like this.
Now I can see that there's a secondary use for an attractive LinkedIn profile picture as well. That might have a lot more leverage than cold-calling offices these days.
Anyway, just as a little anecdotal test, I just logged into LinkedIn and looked at two profiles, both attractive women, where one is a recruiter and the other is a developer. In the recruiter case, every single entry in the "people also viewed" list was female (and also a recruiter), in the case of the developer they were almost completely male (with two exceptions) and are either developers or work for the same company.
I don't know... maybe this is indicative of something that should be considered "creepy" but I have my doubts.
So... are attractive women particularly drawn to recruiting for some reason, or is physical appearance a hiring criteria for recruiting companies? Both? Neither?
She was interested in it primarily for the pay; they were promising something like 45-60k a year, and her current position was only around $30k. You start off as a recruiter, and then you move up into account management, which is better pay and a larger budget for wining and dining clients.
-It tells people when I view their profile. So now I never view people's profiles because I don't want to look like a stalker. Imagine if Facebook worked this way.
-An andecdote, but maybe you've experienced it: a guy I worked with about 3 years ago (and only for 2 weeks) has "endorsed" me several times recently. I don't know if this is some kind of quid pro quo, but it makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
In fact, there is an bookmarklet that shows the list: http://thekeesh.com/2013/03/updated-facebook-friends-ranking...
http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/42
>You'll see profile stats about who's viewed your profile if:
>You have a premium account. This will also give you access to Profile Stats Pro.
>You have a free basic account and have set your privacy settings to show your name and headline.
In other words, as long as you shell out some cash you can avoid detection while viewing other people's profiles but still see when they view yours.
https://www.linkedin.com/settings/wvmp-visibility?goback=%2E...
Personally I keep mine fully on since it is a good way of passive contact (I once browsed ~1000 VCs with a headline that was somewhat provocative as an experiment and about half looked at my profile back and 6 of them emailed me asking what I was working on).
Note: I actually designed this feature at LinkedIn after doing a ton of interviews with people and going to multiple privacy organizations and the EU to make sure it wasn't violating anyone's privacy by making it a tit-for-tat system that was by default anonymized (if you click on profile stats, it prompts you to switch your setting if you want to see who has viewed your profile (or did when I was there)).
Links to people's private profiles have an auth token in it that is good only for the account that generated it, so unless you're relatively closely connected, you can't actually view links to random private profiles posted by people on the internet.
They included: Several people with the same name as I (expected, not really creepy). But also: People that I trained martial arts with, and I NEVER exchanged electronic messages with them, and I do not talk with them for 4 years now. Also I doubt they remember me to search me, I am not much remarkable. People that I met at school and church 6, 7 years ago, and that again, I never exchanged electronic messages with them.
Yes, LinkedIn is very, very, very creepy.
If you do not like that aspect of the social network, do not join it.
Would it creep you out if I guess which month you were born in? Probably not.
Would it creep you out if I guessed your exact birthday, including month/day/year? Hell yeah it would.
It has nothing to do with whether or not one wants to be social, and everything to do with random, axe-murderer creepiness. Imagine if I walked up to you at a party and rattled off names of 5 random people from different aspects of your life; would that not freak you out? "Oh, you don't know me, but I know you ;)". That's virtually the same thing that is happening here.
Well, if your instructor kept emails of all students in his personal address book, and he happened to share it with LinkedIn, then LinkedIn may deduce that each person on the list may be somehow connected to each other.
I searched for an ex once on LinkedIn and found nothing...until a year later when she finally signed on and there she was in my "you might know" suggestion list.
It's reasons like this I wish someone would do a Public/Private key based p2p social network. Essentially you digitally sign a key that you know someone and that's how you derive connections. Seems like you could implement browsable profiles as well.
There would still be the key-exchange problem (I can't imagine a system that would make it easy for non-technical people to exchange keys out of band, even if you could explain why that was necessary and what it means), but with good browser tools I bet the number of zero-knowledge type sites/p2p networks would explode.
As far as the creepier name mismatches go, my oldest email address list has tons of maiden names and unused/defunct email addresses. It's likely that some high school friend of the OP uploaded an old address book and LinkedIn's algorithm made a best effort match on some of the rarer names even if the email addresses don't match. I mean, how many Lucy Hatsbaughs do you think there are on linked in? Two? LinkedIn may as well gamble on odds like that.
Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.
But, other posters have done some anonymous experiments that suggest there's something else going on, perhaps with cookies from other sites or IP addresses. I'm not sure how we'd figure it out, though.
>> Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.
I'm not judging, I promise. :)
I didn't import my address book, but the most logical suggestion is they imported theirs and LinkedIn did an ultra-simple matchup.
So, I'm guessing that my address was somehow added to their address books, which they then imported, and that's how LinkedIn identified out "connection". What that doesn't explain, though, is why these invitations were sent out. I'm confident that none of these people would have knowingly sent an invitation to me, so I'm guessing that LinkedIn is obtaining their "consent" without making it clear what is going on.
If anybody understands the process behind this, I'd be glad to know. The sad part is that once I realized who these people were and that they almost certainly didn't intend to send invitations to me, I didn't bother to investigate any further, because that's the kind of thing I've come to expect.
If you really want to talk about creepy, I'm fairly sure they use your IP address to match against other people who live/work at the same location: when I created a test account with dummy information, the first contacts that were suggested to me were my roommates.
Error establishing a database connection
as more creepy :)
Endorsed: Product Knowledge.
Update: Creepy. But I think most of this data can be lifted from other users who imported contacts from GMail. I think they must be matching only by name, because people could have been in touch with different mail addresses (at a previous employer, for instance).
http://www.interactually.com/linkedin-creepiest-social-netwo...