Via the New York Times’s Vindu Goel I learned about this lawsuit against LinkedIn: Users Sue LinkedIn Over Harvesting of E-Mail Addresses – NYTimes.com.
I’m glad someone is suing them. I have been irritated at LinkedIn, when they — without my permission or instructions — grabbed, so to speak, all my email addresses to announce something I can’t even remember about my whatever. Status? “Adding new skills” nonsense? (I hadn’t added new skills. Someone else, maybe LinkedIn, decided to add new skills and that, too, made me mad.)
Annoyed, I changed the “new skills” thing back to the same old skills but then started getting emails from friends who had been invited to link up with me on LinkedIn and had the sublime courtesy to write to me and say they didn’t use LinkedIn and couldn’t understand it, anyway, or figure out what it did.
What I couldn’t understand was: what was LinkedIn doing contacting my email address book? Some of the addressees must have been utterly bewildered, if they paid any attention at all. Like my bank? My insurance broker? The web service from which I buy lanolin because no one in New York sells pure lanolin anymore, apparently? Various miscellaneous contacts I had at some point in my life but can no longer even identify? Who are these people?
So sue away, users! I won’t be joining the lawsuit but I am cheering you on.