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The fact that they intermingle "add this person to my network" with "invite this person to LinkedIn" on that page drives me insane.

I accidentally sent my friends a bunch of annoying messages to their school email addresses as I sat there clicking and asking myself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?". Really we are but LinkedIn creates these shadow profiles for each of their email addresses.

Especially since they seem to never go away and you can invite repeatedly, like once a quarter when you scroll through asking yourself, "How are we not connected, we've known each other for years?"




When I signed up, I made the mistake of giving LinkedIn access to my Gmail address book. Somehow this meant they actually had access to a list of every person I had ever e-mailed, even if only once.

So ever since then, LinkedIn has been trying to trick me into sending invites to people I've never met who I've briefly inquired about sharing an apartment with, various administrators at the schools I attended, and women who I went on some dates with back in 2009. Having an interface that's designed to funnel me into an inauthentic and embarrassing social gesture means I have to keep a state of anxious vigilance whenever I use it.


Hopefully you've learned something important about not giving your login credentials for any service, to another service. ;)

[And yeah, I'm aware of people doing this for other services too, eg financial account management. Expecting they'll become further anecdotes later one... :(]


I signed up with an email alias specifically created for LinkedIn, and it still managed to associate my Facebook friends as possible connections. What the frick.


Keep an eye on mobile apps that steal your address book.




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