
LinkedIn called me a white supremacist because I happen to share a name with one - tptacek
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/05/linkedin_called_me_a_white_supremacist.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru
======
arcticfox
Not this serious, but when I updated my position from entry level at Microsoft
to CTO of a startup, LinkedIn notified all of my connections that I was now
CTO of MICROSOFT.

Customer service said it was a "known issue". My friends thought it was funny,
but I'm stia little annoyed because it made me look sloppy.

Come on, LinkedIn, you have one job!

~~~
mpeg
Turn off the option to notify your network in your Linkedin profile, that'll
sort out most of these issues.

"Congrats on your new role !" \- No, dude, I got the promotion a year ago,
it's just that I am now looking to jump ship so I updated my Linkedin

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I often get suggestions to connect to my dead mother. I just figured linkedin
liked me as much as I like them.

~~~
a3n
I get connect requests from women who are the manager of Ford Motor Company in
Nigeria, or the Vice President of some bank in London, or other ludicrous and
unlikely occupations. Always women. Every other day or so.

~~~
goldenkey
LinkedIn is just looking out for you. They know kids will continue your
legacy, bigger userbase. Cough cough. >.<

------
JaggedJax
This is a good opportunity for everyone to disable this feature before
LinkedIn sends any news articles to your contacts about you.

Go here
([https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/privacy](https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/privacy))
and turn off the setting labeled "Notifying connections when you're in the
news". It's the last item in the first section. While you're still on that
page, scroll to the bottom and enable two factor auth too.

~~~
facetube
This is also a good opportunity to close your LinkedIn account and never look
back. Between the password thefts and algorithmically-generated libel, I have
no idea why people continue to trust LinkedIn with their data and likeness.

~~~
home_boi
Because all the information you add to your LinkedIn is public information
that you want everyone to see.

It's not like Facebook where people can get access to personal photos or
intimate conversations.

~~~
facetube
The person in the article didn't post that they were a white supremacist, but
somehow LinkedIn communicated that to the world. The issue isn't that they're
making information you added public, it's that they're making up information
about you.

------
leroy_masochist
It's rather odd that their news algorithm exists in the first place.

I use LinkedIn for one reason and one reason only: to maximize my career
options, both in scope and magnitude of opportunities. While I'm happily
employed, I learned long ago that if you're not spending a few hours a month
thinking about other career opportunities, you're hurting yourself in the long
run. LinkedIn is a great platform to stay on top of that several-hours-per-
month workflow.

For example, you see that an acquaintance has changed jobs....you send them a
text...you grab coffee and talk about their career change....you gather the
data point and keep your network primed. LinkedIn has made this process way
easier to initiate than it used to be -- for me, at least.

So I really, really don't get why someone thought it would be a good idea to
build an algorithm that assigns news stories to LinkedIn members. If I find
myself in the news, and I think it's a cool story that makes me look good to
potential employers, _I can share it to my LinkedIn network_. Hell, if I
really like the article, I can embed it permanently on my profile.

Thank God I have a relatively rare first-last name combo that makes it very
unlikely that something like what happened to Will Johnson could happen to me.
That's straight-up nightmare material.

It's pretty boggling that LinkedIn would implement a feature that not only
doesn't create value for its users, but actively poses a risk to their ongoing
career development. The whole point of the site is essentially to serve as a
cloud-mounted, data-rich business card. Why jeopardize that platform with
crappy AI that spreads harmful falsehoods about members?

~~~
caseysoftware
I think it's so that people can congratulate you first. Think of it as the
"local boy makes good" storyline. I've done that a few times when I meant to
email someone, got distracted, and was reminded when their name popped up on
TwitbookIn or whatever the site is now.

And you're right, "Leroy Masochist" is a rare name combo.. ;)

~~~
leroy_masochist
That's a good point, but isn't the distribution of "local boy makes good"
stories a bit of an edge case? I mean do we really need AI to do that for us
at the risk of something bad happening?

I'm not trying to imply that you personally agree with LinkedIn's decision, by
the way; just trying to get my head around why _they_ think it makes sense.

~~~
vidarh
I think they see it as an issue where most of the time it's "close enough"
that if it's wrong it'll just be wrong in a way that people will laugh off and
that will _still_ generate engagement.

As long as the cases where it goes wrong enough to be offensive and hurtful
are rare enough, there's very little downside to them.

~~~
caseysoftware
That makes sense as the closest answer (but still guessing).

They could further limit it by location/region or companies mentioned to
improve the quality but that may be overkill and reduce the number of
notifications too much for their tastes.

------
11thEarlOfMar
The web is simply a comedy of errors and agendas.

\- LinkedIn sends the wrong guy's network a libelous e-mail

\- Slate reports on said wrongdoing and has to issue corrections about the
details [1]

\- Turns out the author is a writer with a play to hawk [2]

\- And the original 'White Supremacist' gets still more press than most of us
want he and his organization to receive.

It all represents everything that is wrong with the web in a single post.

From the article's footnotes:

[1] *Correction, May 25, 2016: This article originally misspelled David Sacks’
last name. It also misstated that his birthday party cost $125 million. It
took place in a house then being sold for $125 million. (Return.)

[2] Will Johnson is a teacher and writer based in New York City. His newest
play, Blue Balls, will premiere at the Labute New Theater Festival in St.
Louis this July.

~~~
underpantsgnome
Given the context, I kinda hope the error/correction was intentional,
committed by someone who doesn't like David Sacks.

~~~
efes
so his name was misspelled intentionally so linkedin would not inform his
lawyer and/or publicist of the article?

------
daniel-levin
How did this "Connections in the news" feature use a person's name and surname
to uniquely identify them? This is appallingly asinine, as this example
indicates. My name is as generic as they come, and so this is a risk for me. I
wonder if LinkedIn were to group its members by name and count them, how many
people (excluding those not on LinkedIn) would actually be uniquely determined
by a name/surname combo? A quick search for "William Johnson" yields 7,476
results. Why didn't LinkedIn even ask this guy to confirm if he was indeed
that William Johnson in the news? What an absolute fuck-up.

~~~
danielweber
Did all 7486 William Johnsons on LinkedIn have that sent out to their
contacts?

The top William Johnson on my LinkedIn page is black. I wonder if the
algorithm cared about the race of the guy in the photo before sending out the
mail. In some ways that would be even worse.

~~~
a3n
I don't remember: they don't ask your race on LI, do they? And let's hope,
hope hope that they aren't doing facial analysis of photos for something that
is absolutely irrelevant.

------
ikeboy
>Correction, May 25, 2016: This article originally misspelled David Sacks’
last name. It also misstated that his birthday party cost $125 million. It
took place in a house then being sold for $125 million.

Kind of ironic, in an article about accidental identification.

~~~
rco8786
I'm surprised that a "$125 million birthday party" passed the author's BS
meter when he wrote it.

~~~
danielweber
When you look at the other things he complains about, you can see he totally
wanted it to be true, and so why bother checking it?

~~~
jsemrau
Unless of course no person checked it. Might this be, and I am wildly
hypothesizing, an experiment with algorithmic content creation?

~~~
chris_wot
Using another source of algorithmicly generated content to produce its own
content? If it was, then I'd love to see linked in do a news post with this as
the news item, which could then force Slate to do a story update.

This guy would never _not_ be in the news!

------
tlrobinson
_> It’s similar to the arrogance of Dropbox and Airbnb employees booting
neighborhood residents off a soccer field they’ve used for years._

Seriously? People expecting to be able to use a field they reserved using the
city's official reservation system is "arrogance"?

If anyone is at fault for that incident it's the city for not getting more
input from community, or subsequently not communicating the changes.

~~~
danielweber
It was tone deaf, especially posting it on the Internet.

But this article is a good reminder that there are folks who don't like
property rights when the wrong people have them.

~~~
jimbokun
What "property rights"? Public space is meant to be available to, you know,
the public.

~~~
Chris2048
> reserved using the city's official reservation system

------
glitcher
I feel like the author went too easy on LinkedIn.

> I don’t expect much from companies like LinkedIn, but when their
> incompetence makes our lives more difficult, they could at least pretend to
> care a little more.

This had the potential to do a lot more harm than just making his life "more
difficult".

------
brentm
I don't trust LinkedIn at all. They are constantly trying to trick you into
engaging just a little bit more. One example is iOS accepts of invites to
connect. They use cards to show network requests. Once you've gone through the
pending batch they use the same card but instead of accepting your now
requesting someone or congratulating someone. It's just one of those products
where you need to constantly have your guard up.

------
rm_-rf_slash
I'm lucky in that I'm pretty sure my combination of first and last name is a
first in history, but I feel for the "William Johnson"s of the world. He is
lucky for having there been a notification about this. He could just have
easily been passed over for job offers or more after a quick search and no
correspondence, just a "we're not interested."

Maybe the European "right to be forgotten" has something to it after all...

~~~
jerf
I'm not searching for a job right now, but I've decided that the next time I
do, my resume will also contain a "This is me" that says what is me on HN,
reddit, github, etc., and a disclaimer that anything else with that name isn't
necessarily me. There are at least two other programmers that share my name,
one of which even has vaguely similar programming language skills, to say
nothing of all the other hits it gets. And my handle "jerf" is merely rare,
not unique, and not everything that comes up under that is stuff I'm
associated with either.

I recommend this to everybody.

~~~
morgante
I feel reasonably secure that "Morgante Pell" is globally unique and
"morgante" is only slightly less so.

------
rmchugh
Incredible that they would ship something so potentially damaging when they
openly acknowledge that it's unreliable. It would be trivial to include an
emailed request for confirmation to the subject before spamming her/his
contacts. Move fast and break people's reputations!

~~~
netsharc
1\. Establish a news website. 2\. Spend a few years so people respect your
site as legitimate. 3\. One day, issue headline "LinkedIn executives X, Y, Z,
etc. arrested in pedophile ring investigation". Or some other heinous crime.
4\. "Enjoy your update emails, you fuckers."

------
amichal
LinkedIn's likely response: "We had a 'Wrong Person?' link right there." See
it? It's in color:#999999 way off to the right.

Edit: Reading the entire article, it appears that is more or less what they
said.

------
dmode
Honestly, I have no idea what LinkedIn's strategy and long term goals are.
They are supposed to a professional networking site that helps members advance
their careers. Now they are trying to play the Facebook and Twitter engagement
game of "growth hacking" at all costs. It works for Facebook to spam people
and do all sorts of questionable stuff since they are not a professional
networking site. But it is completely misguided for LinkedIn to play fast and
lose.

~~~
EdHominem
They've just started a gig-economy site (Profinder) using their social data to
score the workers.

As if there wasn't enough of a reason to game them before.

------
toomuchtodo
Libel As A Service arrives!

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Nothing new: just post a misleading infographic to Tumblr and they'll take it
from there.

------
wglb
There is a fellow with my exact name that used to live in the same town as I
did, had a son with the same name as my son. He ran a startup and sold it for
large dollars, but ended up with a giant IRS bill on the order of 8 figures.

And one of the fellows on my team worked for him before working for me.

Which is hilarious, but what was not so funny is that the perscriptions at
Walgreens for our respective sons ended up tangled up and it took 45 minutes
on the phone to straighten it out. After that, Walgreens began verifying your
address.

Fortunately my story is mostly positive, unlike this poor fellow.

------
gloriousduke
A libel case resulting from a situation like this could be important in
setting precedent for how responsible companies need to be with (for?) their
AI.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Simple: penalize the lack of oversight unless it can be proven that an
AI/algorithm is significantly superior at performing a task than a human. So
if a human trucker is asleep at the wheel while the AI drives and the truck
crashes, fault the driver (and possibly company if policy) for negligence. If
the driver is awake and the AI glitches out and the driver does the best they
can to rectify the situation but still results in a crash, then it it was it
is: a mistake.

~~~
kbenson
The question is whether you are rating superiority on the overall set of
classifications, or the smaller set of problems. I suspect it's a much easier
task to make an AI that's better at reducing accidents than the general
public, than it is to do that and also be better given a specific set of error
conditions, such as "in a direction with a glare, and with roadwork and
changed road conditions, correctly notice that the dog running ahead off to
the side with people chasing it might be a situation that could spill into the
road..."

In this case though, I imagine they allocated far more resources towards
positive correlations than exclusions, since they just want a way to get their
name in front of you.

------
pessimizer
You have to code for the 99% of cases, not the 1%. You can't assume there to
be more than one example of a combination of the fifth most common first name
in the US and the second most common US surname. And even if that happens, you
can't expect more than 1% of people to be named William Johnson, so it's
better dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Linkedin's market cap is only 17
billion; they're not made of money.

------
PaulHoule
I dunno, I made a joke about "White People" years ago on Twitter (something
like "White People won't dance") and then Klout figured I was an expert on
"White People" and sent me a free subscription to the Red Bulletin.

------
leephillips
From the article: "The nature of profit is that you take more than you give,
so it’s not surprising that these billion-dollar behemoths that call
themselves startups take far more from us than we get in return."

Other commenters have weighed in on this remark, which displays a shockingly
childish view of economics. But if the author believes this, then his decision
to use LinkedIn can not be rational, unless his goal is to lose.

I'm not on LinkedIn, but I get emails from them all the time. I assume it's
just another cesspool and con job. This guy, at some point, decided to trust
them with data about him. I'm finding it hard to feel very sympathetic.

~~~
aetherson
You can fail to understand basic economics, and even make pretty dumb
decisions, and still be pissed off if all your friends and colleagues get an
email that says you're a racist.

------
tptacek
Holy shit.

~~~
petewailes
Yup. But par for the course, when you have a culture of "good enough".

It's all fine until you accidentally Nazificate people...

~~~
protomyth
He should be happy they think his name is real. You can get some real fun
going when they won't acknowledge that.

------
sethd
Of all the social networks, LinkedIn in seems to frequently do things that
make it look like not only the shadiest social network but also the most
incompetent.

------
marcus_holmes
stopped reading when I hit this gem:

"The nature of profit is that you take more than you give,"

um, no, actually the nature of profit is that you generate more value than the
worth of the inputs. Some (but not all) of that extra value is your reward for
doing this. So in fact, the nature of profit is that you make more than you
get.

I don't mind anti-capitalist diatribes every now and again, but getting the
basics right is a must.

------
altonzheng
How did this get to the #1 spot of Hacker News?

I love this forum because I find I can engage in meaningful discussion and
actually get thought out replies, but it seems like any mention of LinkedIn,
degrades into a cesspool of "LinkedIn only spams me!" (Uh... have you heard of
email settings?) "LinkedIn is totally irrelevant, I don't understand why
people still use it!" (Uh... okay, not everyone has a well paying, highly
demanded tech job) "LinkedIn is literally satan. (Uh... okay no argument).

I'm all for constructive discussion about the engineering mistakes or product
decisions behind this, but it just seems like its repeatedly the same inane
comments about how "useless" LinkedIn is. It seems like stuff like this is
always spun into a story about how evil or incompetent a corporation is, but I
feel like we tend to forget that at the end of the day, behind these products
are simply engineers trying their best to create tools and products that they
think add value. (FYI: This email comes from a startup LinkedIn acquired
called Newsle.)

(disclaimer: I work for LinkedIn)

~~~
rspeer
Way to defend dark patterns. "Uh... have you heard of e-mail settings?" is
particularly tone-deaf when it comes to the terribleness of LinkedIn's e-mail
settings.

If the best argument for your product is that people literally have to use it
to get by, that's not something to be proud of.

~~~
altonzheng
I'm not responsible for the email settings, but could you point out exactly
what is terrible about LinkedIn's email settings? I'll link it to you
directly: [https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/email-
controls](https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/email-controls).

I've had no problem unsubscribing (even as an employee, I'll admit a lot of
these emails are not useful to me). The volume of email I receive from
LinkedIn, even before I unsubscribed, was much less compared to what I get
from Hipmunk or Airbnb. But I don't complain about that in a public forum,
because I realize I can unsubscribe, and it's a minor nuisance. (Also, not to
bash Airbnb, but I'm a host and I really want to unsubscribe from receiving
emails when a guest messsages me, but I can't find the option anywhere!)

It's not my job to convince you to like LinkedIn, but I want to make it clear
that our engineers are not in the market of "dark patterns" or whatever you
want to spin it as. I will eagerly forward any feedback you have to the
engineers who work on email/privacy settings.

~~~
rspeer
Here's the hilarious thing about that page. I've been there before in an
attempt to opt-out of LinkedIn e-mails. It has a lot of categories of e-mails
it wants me to opt-out of separately, and I know I opted out of all of them
that I possibly could last time I was there. (I believe there were other well-
hidden pages I also had to go to.)

Since then, you've _added_ one called "Jobs and Opportunities", and it's
switched on. This has happened before. Of course your company is aware it's
doing this, but it would be bad for business if you never sent e-mail to
people just because they unsubscribed, wouldn't it.

It's great that you had me check because now I have solid evidence of the
"adding new categories that are automatically opted-in" behavior.

How _often_ do you expect me to log in to LinkedIn, a service that I hate, and
remind it that I really don't want its spam?

~~~
altonzheng
Well... I'm sorry that you truly hate LinkedIn, and you're definitely free to
use whatever services you like. I think you bring up a valid point about
emails being default opt-in. Honestly, I'm just a junior engineer so I don't
have much sway, but you can take my word that I'll try to find the owners of
the email service and bring your issue up.

------
phantom_oracle
LinkedIn is now what Yahoo was after the Microsoft offer fell through.

They're just going to stay in a state of limbo, doing stupid things like this
(I bet this 'product' has a whole Product team behind it), getting presumably
half of their userbase pwned (makes you wonder if Yahoo ever experienced that)
and doing whatever they can to milk their resource/site for new revenue.

I don't think anybody can suggest a decent way for them to keep growing (in
numbers and revenue) without some element of sleaziness involved, because
they've probably attempted those sleazy strategies already.

Sadly though, like so many proponents here say, LinkedIn has become the
monopoly in the professional networking market. So we're all stuck with a shit
site that makes privacy-related matters _opt-in_ and nothing can really be
done about it (suggesting that a _" better linkedin"_ be started isn't exactly
an option either), but we all need it to find better jobs or grow our
networks.

~~~
a3n
> I bet this 'product' has a whole Product team behind it

I bet this product was done by an intern who's no longer there, and lots of
people at LI don't even know it exists until someone complains about it.

------
wmccullough
_slow clap_

It sounds like a database call somewhere has a cardinality bug, or that they
search purely by name instead of some unique identifier.

~~~
pauloday
I'd guess they just search by name, that's all they consistently have to go
off for news stories from a third party.

~~~
dragonwriter
What I wonder is, from a libel perspective, is putting an up-front disclaimer
that your association of a person with information is done without even
rudimentary validation that is true information about the person it is
associated with a _defense_ against libel, or just an _admission_ of one of
the key elements of the tort?

I'd be interested to see this litigated; I'm hoping the latter, because
otherwise I expect the rate of algorithmic defamation to increase to rather
intolerable levels in the not-to-distant future.

~~~
mpclark
From my newspaper days, no amount of disclaiming will get round the fact that
they put a picture of the guy next to the article. The test in the UK is if
whatever you publish will make a reasonable person think worse of an
individual and there are only a handful of very specific defences available,
the best of which is that whatever you say is true.

~~~
diyorgasms
Libel laws in the UK are notoriously very favorable to the plaintiff. At least
in the US, the test is more along the lines of "knowingly false".

------
BinaryIdiot
I'm not entirely surprised. The LinkedIn site and customer service is just
awful. Then again I'm not their customer, I'm their product so why should they
give a shit about my issues or the issues of the author? Granted mine were
more minor but I reported all sorts of issues with their messages system all
of which have gone unresolved but one (took them months to finally make my
notification indicator go away; an issue one of their engineers confirmed to
me was an issue).

Honestly I would just close my LinkedIn account but being in the technology
industry it seems almost impossible to escape it if you want to have a career.
Yes you don't _need_ it but not having it makes applying for jobs, having
people find you, and even you finding jobs all more difficult.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Then again I'm not their customer, I'm their product so why should they give
> a shit about my issues or the issues of the author?

You aren't their "product", you are one of very many suppliers, each of which
provides a very small quantity of the product they are reselling.

Which is not to say your general point is wrong, but LinkedIn and similar
firms aren't in the slave trade.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> LinkedIn and similar firms aren't in the slave trade.

It's just a generalization that people use to describe a technology company
that essentially requires users to bring value to a company's paying
customers.

~~~
dragonwriter
I'm familiar with the pattern: I'm saying that its a bad description, and that
there is a much better one available.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
I don't know seems pedantic to me. I see a very minimal difference between the
two. Doesn't even seem like a worthwhile conversation to be honest.

------
deanclatworthy
Whilst abhorrent, it's easy to see how this happened. No matter how much you
train a machine it will make mistakes in this kind of classification when
natural language is involved. Identifying that an article is about something
or someone is a very very hard problem.

~~~
transpy
I agree. I feel this points towards the limits of linguistic-based technology.
Relying just on text strings to find correlations/matches is not enough. What
I wonder is: why don't recommendation engines go beyond and try to cluster
entities by more sophisticated means? It must be possible to determine that,
in this case, the person involved was not clustered -not 'close enough'\- to
the universe of entities related to white supremacists. Relying just on
words/names will lead to this kinds of results, specially where ambiguity is
involved (the person's name is unfortunately very common).

------
chris_wot
Their response time to this sort of thing is dreadful. If their algorithm is
this inaccurate and potentially harmful then they need to be responding within
at least 3.75 hours to the reporter and within the day they should have a
correction that goes out the door.

I wish that they had been sued in this case. There's nothing like losing lots
of money on lawyers and damages to drive positive change in most large
companies. Pity it has to be that way, but it was a calculated risk that
nobody would have their reputation harmed by this dodgy algorithm.

------
foota
The quote re: David Sacks is incorrect: UPDATE: Sacks tweeted to correct our
sources' recollection of the invitation they'd seen: "It's 'let _him_ eat
cake' not them. It's a birthday party. Get it?" We get it, David. Apologies
for the error. ([http://www.businessinsider.com/yammer-david-sacks-party-
let-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/yammer-david-sacks-party-let-them-eat-
cake-2012-6))

~~~
danielweber
It's good to see how little this author cares to fact-check negative stories
about people he doesn't like.

Is sending out a incorrect and reputation-damaging statement better if done by
an dumb algorithm or by a self-absorbed human?

------
scottlocklin
Linkedin keeps suggesting a girl I went on a date with ONE FREAKING MISTAKE OF
A TIME, who I seriously never ever want to talk to again, is a potentially
awesome connection. I know it's because she let them scan her email inbox.
This actually disturbs me more than something which is obviously a mistake. If
my professional connections mistake me for a nazi war criminal, well, they're
so stupid, they're not worth knowing.

------
franciscop
I closed my Linkedin account few days ago. I'm still baffled at how little my
life has changed. Actually I just stopped receiving annoying messages!

~~~
leephillips
I've never been on LinkedIn and they spam me constantly.

------
TillE
I have a moderately common name, shared by several people with more impressive
public accomplishments than I have. I always laugh about people Googling
someone's name to research them, because that'd be completely impossible for
me without adding a few search terms.

But you don't even need that. If you've ever searched Facebook for a name,
surely you know that most names are not unique identifiers.

------
49531
Man a similar thing happen. Some random tech blogger wrote an article about a
node module I wrote calling it "a new npm" _cringe_ it was pretty embarrassing
to say the least.

I wouldn't have shared the article with anyone but all of my LinkedIn
connections got pinged with the article. The CTO of npm even called out the
article on Twitter. Super embarrassing.

------
orik
I ended up deleting my LinkedIn and now days I send traffic meant to go to
LinkedIn towards localhost in my /etc/hosts file.

------
1ris
I'm very glad about less freedom of speech here in germany. It surely has it's
downsides (mostly because it's a slippery slope). Here you would win big in
court (several hundred euros, you're rich afterwards), but also you'd win the
right to publish a correction on the same place and the same prominence as the
original article.

------
perseusprime11
My favorite - if you don't like somebody, give them an endorsement for water
fall project methodologies.

------
carc1n0gen
Shit like this, plus the leaked passwords is why I decided to deactivate my
LinkedIn account altogether

------
evolve2k
I'm thinking if he wanted to it could be a good oooortunity to come out with a
project promoting compassion and do his own humorous meta campaign negating
the extremism of his namesake.

------
deftnerd
My father-in-law has the unfortunate name "David Duke" AND lived in Texas. He
always gets asked if he's the leader of the KKK.

He tries to take it in stride and not let it affect him.

------
mgraczyk
I don't understand how people can believe that Google or Facebook "sell
people's data" as claimed in the article.

Both of these companies very clearly run their own ad networks and sell
people's attention and time, not their data. Why is this completely inaccurate
claim so often repeated? Because it's catchy?

Getting angry at how Google and Facebook make money is like getting angry at a
cable company for showing commercials. It's not their fault that people watch
so much horrible television, nor is it LinkedIn's fault that the author
continues to use their horrible site.

~~~
ForHackernews
Well, that's splitting hairs, isn't it?

If I run a pizza parlor, and somebody describes my restaurant as "selling
flour, water and cheese", should I loudly object "No, in fact I take those
ingredients and process them into something _else_ that I sell!"

~~~
mgraczyk
No, they really are different. The objectionable part seems to be that data
should be protected and respected, while products made using the data should
be treated with less careful scrutiny. Nobody would object morally to a
restaurant selling flour, water and cheese.

I think a more apt analogy would be somebody describing the pizza restaurant
as "selling an insult to Italian culture". The sale of a culture seems morally
objectionable, and the statement is emotionally charged.

------
supernintendo
Well there's one benefit of having an uncommon name (I've never even met
anyone outside of my family with the last name Matyi).

------
dewiz
Irony wants that the author made a mistake himself when writing that post. See
the (*) note at the end of the page.

------
coldcode
Google+ (remember that) keeps asking me if I know myself. It's very
existential but clearly idiotic.

------
thaumasiotes
> The nature of profit is that you take more than you give, so it’s not
> surprising that these billion-dollar behemoths that call themselves startups
> take far more from us than we get in return.

This is an excellent argument for prohibiting the existence of companies, or
any commercial transactions at all.

~~~
feral
But it's not true.

The nature of profit is that you make more than you spend. But that does not
mean you take more than you give - value is also created in the exchange (or
at least it should be).

(Maybe that is what you're pointing out, reductio ad absurdum? I'm not sure.)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Yes, that was my point. The nature of profit does mean that you receive more
from your customer than you give back to them. Gains from trade mean that your
customer also receives more from you than they give to you.

I was going to provide that as further text to my original comment, but
thought it would be more effective to let the quote speak for itself.

Guess not. :/

------
tryitnow
Isn't LinkedIn supposed to have an amazing data science team?

Hmmmm.

------
adnam
Is this not why we have libel laws?

~~~
kpwagner
I think intent factors in. LinkedIn's information was false but (in all
likelihood) not malicious.

~~~
mpclark
Being malicious makes defamation worse, but it doesn't have to be malicious to
defame.

------
LogicFailsMe
Libel lawsuit immediately...

------
serge2k
> My email included the words libel and attorney

I understand why this is offensive, but really?

~~~
notahacker
If an organization circulated emails to all your professional contacts which
stated that you were a "white nationalist", would you sit back and rely on
their good intentions to resolve things?

Especially if your professional contacts weren't people that worked in tech
that could spot a shitty algorithm from a mile off

~~~
serge2k
I'd send an email asking them to change it.

actually it's linkedin, so I'd probably delete the email without reading it
and maybe email them when someone asked me about it later.

------
karmacondon
Is this really a problem? The author doesn't say that anyone from his linkedin
network contacted him and asked "Are you a white supremacist?" Most people
would see the headline and immediately realize that it was an algorithm error,
a common part of daily life. Anyone who was invested in the author's
reputation would probably check the details of the story and see that it was
talking about a completely different person. I have a hard time imagining that
anyone was fooled by this.

If someone could possibly confuse me for a white supremacist Donald Trump
delegate then either 1) that person isn't trying very hard and I probably
don't want to work with them or 2) I need to take a serious look at my life
choices

~~~
joosters
_At this point, I’d received a bunch of messages from confused connections_

i.e. some of his connections had contacted him.

