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[LinkedIn] XXX, YYY has accepted your invitation.

2 points by shortstuffsushi ↗ HN
This is the second or third time I've received an email from LinkedIn notifying me that someone I've never attempted to communicate with (aside from possibly receiving an email from) has accepted a request to connect.

Is this a problem other people have? Is something fishy going on behind the scenes? Why are people I've whose profiles I've never viewed being sent invitations from me?

Another thing I've noticed is the suggestions for who I should connect with are people that LinkedIn has no way to know about -- people from my email that I've never viewed on LinkedIn, people I share no connections with.

I'm a bit disturbed, I don't know why this is happening, but I'm almost positive their sniffing my email somehow, since that's the only place these "connections" have ever contacted me.

8 comments

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jdabney
This same thing happened to my wife yesterday. I didn't have any idea how that happened.
rnovak
Well, they could have sniffed around their email, they might have let them in for all you can be sure. They do have those "let me find your connections" tools, and some people _do_ use them. I mean, their email's would have a record as would yours, correct?
shortstuffsushi
Same as my response to dangrossman -- that is a possibility I hadn't considered, but the timing of it (it seems to happen within days of contact with that person). I guess it could be purely coincidental.
sgrove
Out of curiosity, do you have Rapportive installed?
dangrossman
> I'm a bit disturbed, I don't know why this is happening, but I'm almost positive their sniffing my email somehow, since that's the only place these "connections" have ever contacted me.

Everyone you've e-mailed also has a copy of those e-mails in their mail accounts. If they give access to their mail contacts to LinkedIn, LinkedIn can now suggest them as connections for you, without ever accessing your account. No secret sniffing required.

As for the invitations you haven't sent, that's never happened to me.

shortstuffsushi
You make a good point -- it's possible the inverse happened (people I've contacted have given LinkedIn their email access). It's just the fact that the matches I've seen seem so coincidentally close to when the emails were sent that makes me suspect.
xauronx
I posted this before, but at some point LinkedIn asked to invite people from my gmail and I clicked "Uncheck All" then checked two or three people on the page and hit Request (or whatever). I wasn't aware, but it was a paged interface and uncheck all only worked on the first page. I sent invites to a ton of people unintentionally, got a good number of "Do I know you?"'s. Might not be your problem, but thought I'd throw it out there.