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Vision or not, they have exceptional engineering talent able to draw conclusions about who my ex girlfriends are from 20 years ago and suggest I connect with them.

Or somehow to draw conclusions about who I communicated with on an anonymous dating site and suggest I connect with them.

I'm looking forward to the day that as I walk down the street wearing my Augmented Reality glasses, LinkedIn transparently identifies the faces of the passing people and suggests that I connect to each long lost deeply valued relationship, or suggests I connect to the person walking past who has been stalking me online after I went on one date with them and hated them. Viva LinkedIn!

If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!




Linkedin is just a sum of so many dark patters...

I mean really, take Facebook. Does it suck in some ways? Yes. Does it set the privacy defaults a bit more lenient than my own preferences? Sure.. but I use it and I've found it trivially easy to grasp some of its privacy basics, and set the settings according to my wishes, such that it's usable within my privacy wishes. Further, they've at various times prompted me to look into my privacy settings. All of this has been under enormous scrutiny and pressure, they're no saints... but for me it's a reasonable product in my own experience. If need be, I wouldn't feel bad about closing my FB account because it'd mean FB just wasn't for me, rather than FB is trying to screw me left and right and I need to get out.

Linkedin is very much unlike that, every interaction I have with it says 'close your account because you don't know what the hell Linkedin is doing', and I've not logged on in at least half a year because I fear what kind of alerts and notifications they'll send to my network on the basis of me visiting a few pages there. Like when I turned off 'see who visited my profile', so that I could turn off 'let people see I visited their profile'. A few days later I check my best friends' linkedin because I was updating mine and looking for inspiration, and he jokingly messages me I'm stalking him on linkedin. I couldn't care less he saw that, he's my best friend, but what the f, I just turned that feature off? It's just an accumulation of stuff like that where I've completely lost my trust.

> If "being creepy" is their core business model then they are a great success!

Totally my experience. And I'm even one of those people who's pretty good at bs options, like a tiny remark that give permission for linkedin to email your entire gmail contact list (i.e. anyone you ever conversed with, like say a guy from craigslist you bought a fishbowl from 7 years ago). Even then I feel like Linkedin is just screwing me in broad daylight while I'm paying my utmost attention.


If I might summarize your on-point comment with what came to mind when I went to go accept an invite from an ex-colleague who I like: LinkedIn has gotten to the point that I'm afraid to click anything on their site.

I normally avoid LinkedIn, and I was reminded why: before I click on anything, I wonder "what are the potential consequences of this? If I click "Accept", what other unspoken contracts am I agreeing to, such as all of my connections being notified that I'm now connected to Chellsea?"

It then occurred to me that maybe I should not use web sites that make me feel that way. Yeah, I'm a little behind the curve sometimes. But whether I'm the customer or recruiters are, I don't see how that's a sustainable business long-term.


Yeah, they actually sell the ability to see who visited your page even if they have privacy turned on.


So create a second profile... (I get that you might naturally expect/want that you could use your main profile with some special bit set, but given that the workaround is so trivial, the pragmatist in me has trouble working up a lot of anger over it.)


It's more the violation of trust (also trust in reliability and predictability) that annoys people.


Or just don’t create a profile in the first place?


Wow, well done dude. That very much nails it (really). :D

LinkedIn is kind of like... troll food.


Or maybe the other part told.


Perhaps true.

Surely it would be too creepy to exploit every bit of information available to suggest connections?

No, not too creepy! At LinkedIn if someone searches for you then OBVIOUSLY you MUST know them and want to connect! The clever LinkedIn engineers think "Let's offer a connection to the target of a search for the search originator - that's an engineering challenge, not a complete invasion of privacy creep out."


That would be my guess: former girlfriend running a search to compare what became of you with their current husband. :D


So negative... yet so accurate. :D


They just scanned your mailbox, stupid.


Or somebody else's mailbox (that he at any time in the past happened to send or receive mail from at an address that is either the one LinkedIn has as his main email, or one it has correlated as the same person), which is the real problem.

I can keep LinkedIn out of my mailbox, I can't keep them out of the mailbox of everybody that I have ever sent or received mail from.

LinkedIn is very creepy when it comes to just about everything, IMO.




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