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- Today's not a good day to be a LinkedIn user—doubly so if you use LinkedIn's iPhone or Android app. Researchers have discovered that the app scrapes users' Calendar items and sends the data back up to its servers, even when those Calendar items were created outside of the LinkedIn app. The scraped data includes participant lists, subject of the entry, time of the meeting, and any attached meeting notes (such as dial-in details and passcodes).
lessismore · 4596 days ago · link ·
- "In order to provide our calendar service to those who choose to use it, we need to send information about your calendar events to our servers so we can match people with LinkedIn profiles. That information is sent securely over SSL and we never share or store your calendar information," the company wrote. "In an effort to make that algorithm for matching people with profiles increasingly smarter we pull the complete calendar event, including email addresses of people you are meeting with, meeting subject, location and meeting notes."
If these folks are already on my calendar, it means I already have some sort of relationship with them. Why on science's green earth do I need them to help me more accurately match them? They got caught with their hands in the cookie jar and cannot fess up to being inconsiderate of their users' privacy. I hope a huge lawsuit comes from this and there is a big judgment against LinkedIn. These companies need to be held accountable for their total disregard of end user privacy.
lessismore · 4596 days ago · link ·
The company will soon make a public apology. Explain that it is an error and not intentional. Update the app. Industry "experts" will come out of the woodworks to explain that it is not really a problem.
Being a "product" doesn't feel very good.