Linkedin spam

I received an email from my niece which contained an invitation to join linkedin. I politely declined telling her that I don't participate in social networking sites. She emailed me again, saying that she didn't send it. Linkedin read her address book & sent the invitation themselves.

Geez - what an inappropriate move on their part. Glad I never opened up any of my social networking profiles or emails to linkedIn. Now I know that I never will, either.

It's not automatic -- it gives you the option to allow the site to send invitations to your contacts, but you have to approve it first. She probably just clicked "through" to the next step without saying "no thanks".

Still a shady move on their part.

Shady yes, but legal...

It maybe legal but I would certainly close my account if I had one.

All those social networking sites are BS. I'll admit, I set up a myspace page but I was just goofing off, and I set up a twitter just to see what the big deal was.

On a semi-related side note, I heard a week or two ago about how owners of amazon kindle's who had bought a copy of George Orwell's 1984 had it automatically deleted from their kindle because the copy for sale was a copyright infringement. First of all, its a really funny coincidence that it was the book 1984 that was taken back. But the scarey thing is that they can connect to your personal device and take stuff from you like that. I heard this on an NPR feature, and the person made a good point. They said that years ago if a book were to be banned, they could only prevent the printing and sale of new books, and if copies were found they would be destroyed. Now that it is digital, they can theoretically make it so that the book never existed. I can't remember what they called it in 1984, but this government department could literally change newspapers years after they were printed and thats not much different than this. The movie V for Vendetta comes to mind also. The main character had one of everything banned by the totalitarian government inside his secret lair where they would never find it, that way the government could never totally be successful in their censorship.

Thats enough of my incoherent rants...

I don't know that they are all B.S. Not certain you can just generically blanket all of them in a term like that. For example, I was able to keep tabs on my daughter when she was in Iraq though facebook, not to mention finding several dozen friends that I have lost touch with including old high school and college friends and old co-workers -- none of whom I'd be talking to today. In fact going to a baseball game Sunday with 3 of them that I haven't seen in five years or better.

I've come across people I hadn't seen in more than 20 years on Facebook and I'm only 28 years old.

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I just went through the Linkedin signup process and I see two possible situations here.

1) They're being shady and contacting people even though they specifically state multiple times in obvious places that they will not contact anyone without permission.

2) Your niece is afraid that you'll be mad at her and is lying to you.

If they are being shady and contacting people even though they specifically say they will not without permission, ATNO should be getting an email because he's on my MSN addressbook.

Linkedin makes everything they're going to do pretty obvious from the looks of things.

Here's a screenshot of where they ask for your details. If you use the MSN one it takes you to MSN to confirm the access request.



I did the MSN one, here's the "sneaky" screen they use to "trick" you into allowing them to send emails to people on your friends list. I didn't proceed any further than taking this last screenshot.



I'm sorry to say it but if ATNO doesn't get an email from these people I think there's a good chance you were lied to Don.

My niece is 31, a grown woman, married with children, not some little girl who thinks she might be punished. I doubt she lied to me. She didn't even have to answer my email. I declined the invitation & that was the end of the story, in my mind.

The way you've used them is better than how a lot of teenie boppers are using them. Its just annoying how everybody is going gaga over stuff like twitter. There's restaurants and stuff that use twitter and they say "Mention this tweet and get a free soft drink!" The stuff that annoys me most is myspace, people have all these little videos and music and animations and junk on there myspace pages and all that starts automatically when the page loads, so the page loads slow. When you get thousands and thousands of people world wide doing that simultaneously, that is a pretty fair chunk of bandwidth. I guess if myspace took away the ability to make stuff start automatically like that then it wouldn't be as bad.

If you believe the only people who lie are kids you're a fool, with all due respect. Everybody lies.

I'm a 57 year old street wise guy from New York. I know when people are handing me a load of crap.

Here is a flow chart thing I just stumbled on, its reason enough for me to not do social networking stuff. In fairness though, this says it started with a fake youtube site, which pretty much everybody uses youtube. But still, social networking is dangerous.

edit: woops, forgot the link http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/images/ ... ed_big.gif