Since I just added my résumé which mentions my LinkedIn page, I thought I’d mention something else I just discovered about LinkedIn.
I would normally never give out any of my contacts’ email addresses to third parties under any circumstance, but I decided there was very little risk to do so at LinkedIn because it is a largely used website with many users that is also eTrust certified. Unfortunately, I have also heard eTrust certification isn’t exactly hard to get and shouldn’t have too much stock put in it, but it is still something.
Anyways, after reading LinkedIn’s privacy policy, I decided it would be ok to list some of my email contacts to discover if they also used LinkedIn or not. I, of course, added in a dummy email address of mine into this to watch for spam or advertisements, and it has to date not received anything, though I’m sure any company that illegally released email addresses wouldn’t be stupid enough to let go of newly acquired addresses immediately, but then again, I always assume too much of people/corporations... but I digress. I have discovered that they keep all the emails you give them because one of the emails I gave was recently used to sign up for a new account and LinkedIn immediately informed me of this.
While this is a nice extension to the "find your contacts through their emails" function, LinkedIn really should have given me an option to opt out of this, or at the very least informed me that it was keeping the emails I gave it on record. Unfortunately, even if they do have a good privacy policy and abide by it, there is still the chance a rogue staff member could harvest the emails and sell them.
Oh, LinkedIn is also a very buggy system in and of itself. I very often get timeout errors and many other errors to the extent of “The server cannot perform this operation at this time, please try again later”. A friend of mine has also been having trouble linking our profiles together for more than a week now, with no response to his email to them… besides a type of auto response he got back that had absolutely nothing to do with the reported problem.
