
LinkedIn quietly removes option to export contacts - QUFB
http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/23/linkedin-quietly-removes-option-to-export-contacts-makes-users-wait-up-to-72-hours-for-their-data-archive/
======
takee
It's fairly easy to come up with a long list of shady practices that force me
to not trust LinkedIn:

1\. To start with, they sneaked in the request to access all your email
contacts and constantly spam them in your name which can be embarrassing at
times to say the least.

2\. Their mobile apps do the same with your phone contacts, cleverly hiding
the checkmark (in smallest font) to disallow the uploading of contacts. I have
unknowingly let them look through my contacts at least two different times
prompting me to never install their app again.

3\. Letting others know that you viewed their profile. This is fine as long as
you know about this feature but I bet that a bunch of us were taken by
surprise in the early days to find out that our "online research" on someone
was not private unless if you're incognito.

4\. Charging you beyond the free trial period without any email or
notification about it. I agree that many businesses do this but some of them
like Amazon and Netflix are nice enough to allow you to disable the future
payments before the trail ends. Also they tend to notify you about the
payments.

5\. Letting people have access to my email and other contact info even when I
haven't accepted their request to connect. This may have been fixed with the
recent change but may just have been one of those hidden features that led to
their popularity with the recruiter world in the first place.

I am sure I missed out a bunch of other things here but these are the reasons
why I can never trust LinkedIn.

~~~
suprgeek
\- LinkedIn has employed "Dark Patterns" for a long time to scarf up your
Address Book via your e-mail id. Then unless you are VERY careful you will end
up spamming everyone with an invite.

\- They also employed a MTM attack on your mobile "Intro App"
[https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-
man-...](https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-in-the-
middle-attack-experts/102683)

\- Have you noticed that the LI News feed is a high-noise collection of crap?

\- and on and on

"Monetizing your users" is rapidly making that site useless for almost
everyone.

~~~
colinbartlett
LinkedIn was the first in a long line of social networks I deleted starting 4
years ago. Not sure how anyone gets value out of enough to justify.

~~~
Ntrails
LinkedIn is not a social network. It's a site which holds my CV and then
recruiters message me with Job Specs. I either like the spec or don't, and
sometimes I get interviews from it.

I accept any friend request from recruiters/colleagues and beyond that never
ever use the site.

My justification is I like getting job specs, and the cost is essentially
nothing. Sure I hate that it's got a side panel asking me to connect with an
old Wheel of Time fansite e-friend from Norway who was in my email contacts
and I've not spoken to in some 15 years but it's hardly the end of the world.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Social" in the sense of leveraging (exceptionally aggressively) the social
graph and personal connections.

Less so in terms of content / context.

------
phil_s_stein
Linked In spammed me once when they reached some sort of milestone. The email
had no remove-me-from-this-list link or way to tell Linked In that I didn't
want to receive emails. I found the CEO's email address and forwarded it to
him, asking him to remove me from the mailing list. He sent back a nasty email
and deleted my account.

I've not looked back and my life is exactly as it was, minus a few unwanted
emails.

~~~
dylanjermiah
Do you still have the email from Jeff?

~~~
caseysoftware
Wow, yeah. That would be an interesting one to read.

------
lemevi
LinkedIn has never been interesting to me for anything other than looking at
what past coworkers have been up to. I've never once had an experience where
LinkedIn led to a job and in fact after I deleted my account my recruiter
email volume dropped by an order of magnitude. I've also read that potential
employers search candidates LinkedIn contacts to see if there are any existing
employees and if so ask them about the candidate. Governments, employers,
media, LinkedIn itself and malicious types frequently use all that personal
information people add on LinkedIn to cause harm.

The users are what is for sale on this site. I'm not a LinkedIn user, it's not
worth it.

~~~
jcroll
Recruiters add liquidity to the labor market. I really don't see how they are
a bad thing.

~~~
droopyEyelids
Adding fake liquidity actually removes liquidity.

Imagine if you were selling your house, and I created a service that would
bombard you with 10 fake potential buyers a day. You only have time to deal
with 2 buyers a day. Chances are, you'll miss out on everyone who is actually
interested.

While LinkedIn does not intend to create fake recruitment attempts, it works
out the same in the end.

~~~
notahacker
But the liquidity isn't fake, hence why the firms pay recruiters rather than
waiting for the actually-interested people to beat a path to their door. The
jobs are real, as are the candidates willing to actually show up to an
interview. If you have a job and no suitable candidates, sourcing them is a
valuable service, even if a few people get annoyed by the recruiters (better
by them than by the employer...) along the way.

~~~
Spooky23
Have you ever dealt with a recruiter?

Scum that spam people are like real estate agents sponsoring the PTA meeting
-- they are trolling for listings.

~~~
afarrell
This is a fairly low bar for calling another human scum

~~~
Spooky23
Thanks to people like this who pass out resumes without authorization and shop
candidates, I lost out on a key job opportunity at a time where I was in a
pretty bad personal situation, and the job market was not so great.

So maybe I'm mean, but I have no respect whatsoever for contingency
recruiters.

------
ryandrake
Not sure I share the experience w/LinkedIn that apparently the majority of
HNers have. I get very, very few recruiter messages through LinkedIn. The ones
I do get are thoughtful and do a very good job of matching skill-set,
background, etc.--they have obviously read my profile and are not just
fishing.

This has not always been the case. I used to get the hated torrent of "I see
you have 12 years of development experience, how about this entry level
position!!!" crap, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time. Either
recruiters are getting better, or something I put in my profile has quieted
down the garbage.

Either way, I don't think there's much that I've put on that site that I'd
feel the need to "export" so the topic of this article seems to be a non-
issue. You folks don't have alternate copies of your resume and contacts
somewhere?

~~~
jlees
I also have found the recruiter email to have gotten a lot better recently. As
an experiment (as my startup is hiring - I wanted to see what the candidate
experience might be like these days), I expanded my LinkedIn profile to
trigger as many recruiter-friendly tickyboxes as possible, expecting a deluge
of spam. I got about five messages, all fairly well crafted and personalised
to some extent. Honestly, I get more spam to my email address than InMail
these days.

I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly
identical to my own, changing the name and gender and writing a very terse
summary for each job. Boy, does he get a lot of random spam. I wonder if by
writing a more detailed description of my skills/experience/contributions, I
somehow generate better inbound messages...

Speaking to the point about "what would you export", I definitely have
contacts who I am only connected through via LinkedIn; a key example being
former colleagues whose personal email addresses I never got, and whose work
emails I barely remember. I think it depends on the kind of network you have
built there, though. The more work you've put into your LinkedIn connection
pool, the more you want to export it.

~~~
notahacker
> I also ran a fun experiment where I set up another LinkedIn profile nearly
> identical to my own, changing the name and gender...Boy, does he get a lot
> of random spam.

Alternate hypothesis: bad recruiters looking for software developers filter by
gender...

To be honest, I've had two emails from recruiters in three years, both highly
targeted to specific terms in my profile, and I nearly accepted one of the
jobs. Skipping those horrible spam-magnet keywords altogether is a good start.

------
itgoon
Huh. It seems I'm the only one here who finds value in LinkedIn.

Yes, it has led to actual, paying jobs. It takes some management on my part,
but it's a lot easier than hunting around from site to site, or going to
meetups, or any of that other stuff.

Do I get spammed? Sure. That's why I have a specific email account for them.
Some of the spam is quite informative. I learn about openings early on, and
can often find the hiring company by taking the text of the spam and searching
the various job boards.

I get genuine requests, too. I take the time to respond to those just as
genuinely.

For all the talk of the importance of networking around here, I'm kind of
surprised at the antipathy. It's very low effort, just a few minutes a week.

I regard a lot of the complaints as symptomatic of the overall industry. I
finally started going to meetups, and the signal-to-noise is just as bad, if
not worse.

~~~
vpeters25
> I learn about openings early on, and can often find the hiring company by
> taking the text of the spam and searching the various job boards.

This would be great if it could be automated somehow: paste email to a macro
job board and get links to matching posts.

~~~
akshat_h
It is a tradeoff. If you are looking for a job, or are new to the industry,
linkedin is better than trying to build a professional network otherwise.
After you have been in the industry for, say 15 years, and pretty much know
most of the people working in your space, are highly specialized, then the
recruiter emails will feel like spam. My guess is that for the first case, you
aren't specific enough about yourself, so recruiters have a good chance of
reaching you, based on your profile. After a certain amount of time, your
profile readily doesn't distinguish your interests clearly. For example, a
java developer tag at the start of one's career is quite different from a
senior java developer who has understanding of internals of JVM. Recruiter may
not know about the second case enough to be of much help.

------
eonw
actually, this feature was being exploited by spammers. a pending contact was
still exportable.... so you add thousands of people, then export the list and
send them email. easy way to gather targeted business email addresses that are
worth money.

as much as i may or may not like linkedin(i dont much), i think this little
bit of info is useful when judging the reasoning behind the decision to turn
it off.

~~~
facepalm
If that was the reason, why not just remove exporting of pending contacts?

~~~
eonw
i am not a linkedin employee, i just know a few tricks that blackhats use. :)

thus, i can not explain why they went full stupid instead of just fixing the
issue.

------
georgemcbay
LinkedIn is a worthless piece of spammy shit of a website these days. I
haven't bothered deleting my account but I haven't logged into it in like a
year now and any mail I get from them that somehow makes it through the
filters is reported as spam.

I can only surmise they made this change to make it harder for (more) people
to bail because they know how dreadful using their site is now and this is an
easier "fix" than a Dominos-style mea culpa and positive changes.

~~~
dm2
Some sites just give off a vibe that prevents me from ever trusting them,
LinkedIn is the most predominant in that category and I have never been able
to put my finger on exactly why. The email proxy apps and the pay to see who
viewed your profile aspects don't help.

I'm not saying that it's any worse than any other sites, but LinkedIn has
always felt like a shady company, like they're not on the users side.

I was really hoping that the Google+ reboot would fulfill the niche market
that LinkedIn dominates, but it did not.

~~~
yankoff
The "best" feature they have is automatically sending notifications to all
your peers (and through email) when you change one little thing in your
profile. And they show specifically what you edited. You can disable it of
course in settings, but you have to know about that. I've seen enough awkward
situations come out of this. How is it even possible that they think it is
okay?

~~~
gknoy
I can see the rationalization: I've added React and Javascript to my LinkedIn
profile, so it's probably nice to publish that to recruiters that I'm
connected with, or friends who can endorse them.

Of course, I really don't want to spam them while I am rewriting prose about
jobs until it's done, though, so it'd have been nicer if the spamming didn't
happen until I pushed some kind of "publish" button.

------
richerlariviere
I deleted my account 6 months ago. LinkedIn is untrustable.

------
nileshtrivedi
This link seems to still work for exporting CSV of contacts, including email
addresses:
[https://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport](https://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport)

------
zeeed
They changed a process to make it slower?! o.O

3 days sounds an awful lot as if human intervention were required. What
purpose would this serve?

~~~
JohnTHaller
One optimistic possibility is so that if you leave your LinkedIn account
logged in on a computer somewhere, another individual can't immediately export
all your contacts, which could have competitive or security implications. It
takes multiple days and you get notification of it happening.

~~~
coddingtonbear
I think you've hit the nail on the head, here.

~~~
georgemcbay
Extremely unlikely. I'm sticking with the non-optimistic theory.

If it were really about protecting user privacy they could just have you re-
enter your password to download the contacts, which is the industry standard
thing to do when someone is logged in but doing something you think needs
extra protection against them having accidentally left themselves logged in on
a public system.

3 days is a good number for someone rage-quitting to let it slip off their
radar and just lazily remain a user, not really a useful time period for
security purposes.

------
tubelite
FYI: You can't export contacts from Facebook either. The API no longer
supports getting the entire friends list (restricted to return only those
friends who have also installed the same app).

There is a "download all my facebook data" option, but that only gives you a
plain "firstname lastname" list. No contact information there either.

------
tdkl
One of the main issues I had with LI personally (beside the already posted
dark patterns) was the 3rd party scrapers who used the LI API to recreate
their own listings with LI data. So this means if I changed the data on LI,
the scrapers wouldn't update their own copies of the site. Even when I deleted
my LinkedIn account I had to hunt down separate sites and go through emailing
adventure to get the data removed.

I want to be in whole control of my public data, that's why getting a domain
and posting a blog is maybe more tedious but better at the end.

------
shiv86
Linked in is the king of dark patterns and practices. I was foolish enough to
sign up for a free 30 trial period (of course handing over credit card details
with the expectation they wont just automatically charging me and seek my
permission before charging). I didn’t check my cc statements for a few months
and there you have it ...linked in charged me every month after the trail
period ended.

~~~
bduerst
I get what you're saying but your trial subscription example isn't that
unusual.

A better example of dark patterns is how they repeatedly try to get you to
sync your email contacts by sneaking it in at random points, where you may
accidentally click through it.

Their website has also become a minefield of upsell links, some disguised as
benign engagement (e.g. "Add a new skill") while others are much more spammy
(e.g. "Follow this unrelated business which promotes through us").

------
toomuchtodo
Are there any tools out there that can create something akin to a LinkedIn
profile for static hosting? Something like Jekyll?

~~~
bduerst
Part of the value that LinkedIn adds is that there is some degree of
authenticity to the resumes.

There are some API standards for background checks between businesses and
agencies, so that could be a good place to start. You could offer
authenticated profiles, where people can't lie on their resume about where
they worked.

Of course, LI could just implement this if you became too competitive to them.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Part of the value that LinkedIn adds is that there is some degree of
> authenticity to the resumes.

Can you explain this? I can add any company and whatever job title and list of
responsibilities I want without any verification.

~~~
corin_
It's not perfect but it makes it possible to spot lies. For example if you
manage your company's profile on LinkedIn you can see when a new person says
they've started working for you, and you can click a "they don't really work
here" button. Of course people can still claim to work for "Y C0mbinator", but
then on their profile it won't click through to the same company as listed on
other people's profiles.

It also let's you make better judgements on likelihood they're lying. It's not
impossible to create an authentic-looking fake profile, but generally speaking
if you see someone claiming to work for X company and connected to lots of
employees from X company it's a safe bet that they worked there.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I agree this works for smaller companies, but for larger companies (>=500
employees), no verification is likely to take place.

------
zeeed
I requested my data when I commented first on this thread and just got the
notification that it was ready. So it was 21h for me. Still way too much, but
it's less than three days...

------
rickyci
you have to go to Connections and search a 1st connection name before seeing
his/her email and contacts. You won't see that if u go straight to the person
profile. What was previously a 1-click process is now more like a 3-click
process. A resultant of Linkedin seeming to be incredibly agressive on
monetizing?

------
toephu2
Stuff like this is why I never signed up for LinkedIn in the first place.

------
pauljarvis
I've never been on linkedin but i get 10-15 "requests to connect" every week -
luckily i've filtered them to skip the inbox, since unsubscribing to them
doesn't seem to do anything.

------
Animats
Did they remove that option even for paying users?

------
kolev
Time to abandon ship!

------
curiousjorge
why hasn't anybody disrupted linkedin yet? what would you like to see instead
of linkedin? snapchat for business professionals?

~~~
dudul
This is a good question.

First, I think that LinkedIn includes too many features. Influencers, groups,
pulse and stuff like that. I'm still trying to find a use for groups.
Something more focused on networking would be great.

Second, as I mentioned in a previous message, LinkedIn caters to recruiters
because that's how they get their money, and to me it makes it insufferable.
There is this running joke "Being a developer on LinkedIn is like being a
woman on match.com".

I believe it would be really hard to monetize a sane and clean website for
professionals without turning into this spamming juggernaut.

~~~
Zikes
Ideally, the LinkedIn replacement would also be the recruiters replacement.

Anything that eases communication and discoverability between companies and
professionals without either getting flooded with barely-relevant matches.

------
MichaelCrawford
I only use LinkedIn to find former coworkers and classmates. After that I
email them directly.

However I get lots of connection requests from recruiters. I always accept
them. I figure that greatly dilutes whatever value linkedin might have once
had because most of my connections are recruiters who wadte their time on me
because I dont log in a whole lot.

