
Ask HN: Did LinkedIn started selling user emails last month? - user5994461
I&#x27;ve noticed in the past few weeks, I started getting automated emails from random job platforms and recruiters like &quot;We&#x27;ve noticed your profile on LinkedIn and registered you on our (competing) website etc...&quot;.<p>What makes these odd is that the email is sent straight to my personal email. It&#x27;s not going through LinkedIn to a random generated email like it used to.<p>However the personal email is not part of the public profile, they shouldn&#x27;t have been able to scrape it in the first place.<p>That leaves only two explanations. Either LinkedIn started selling user personal emails away or company found a way to get private info from profiles?
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wjossey
I advertise a lot on LinkedIn- they aren’t selling your email address (at
least not that I’ve seen).

It wouldn’t be in their financial interest to do so. Their goal is to get you
to do outreach on their platform, which requires use of credits (which aren’t
cheap). Giving away emails would undercut their entire business model.

So, safe to say it’s some other way they are getting your address.

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notahacker
> Giving away emails would undercut their entire business model.

And selling them without permission would also probably land them the largest
fine in the history of data protection law.

'I saw you on LinkedIn' is a decent intro for a spammer even if it isn't true,
and a lot of email addresses are linkable to LinkedIn profiles vs email
harvesting tools, including both emails you've actually put on LinkedIn and
emails elsewhere on the internet or in easily-guessable
firstname.lastname@company.com formats.

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wjossey
There are now a ton of websites where you can buy email addresses, like
hunter.io (and many others). Getting emails isn’t all that challenging these
days.

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kpwags
I noticed I got one the other day. It was an aliased email tied only to
LinkedIn.

I was wondering the same thing, especially since I've since changed the email
since the 2012 breach.

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rapfaria
Or the recruiter came to your profile, saw your last position and tried
contacting you at name@company.com. It's been happening to me a lot since
November, when I switched jobs and got an email address just like this.

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recrudesce
Or your email address is in another mailing list that was sold by another
company.

That or you're still using the same email address that was disclosed in the
2012 data breach that LinkedIn suffered... which is easily obtainable.

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Joe-CFOHub
Have you tried hunter.io and seeing if your email can be scraped with tools
like that?

