Better look at their actions than take their slogans at face value. Applies to everyone
But I have such low faith in the platform that I would readily believe that once they think you're not going to continue adding value, they find unpleasant ways to extract the last bit of value that they reserve only for "ex"-users.
Yeah but the OP got spam within hours. That would be pretty unlikely to have coincided with a breach.
But LinkedIn probably sold the data, they have a dark pattern maze of privacy settings and most default to ON.
It amazing really. If you reached out to people and asked them for the information and graph that LinkedIn maintains, most employers would fire them.
I'm ashamed to say I worked at one such place for several months.
Apollo is probably the most comprehensive source for this. It's creepy as fuck.
It helps a lot but I still get a lot of sales goons. A lot of them follow up constantly too "hey what about that meeting invite I sent you why did you not attend"? My deleted email box is full of them (I instantly block them the minute I get an invite to anything from someone I don't know, and I wish Outlook had the ability to ban the entire origin domain too but it doesn't)
What do you mean by "intelligence platform"?
It's "intelligence platform" in the sense that you can gain a ton of information on individuals, organizations, and relationships that drive it all. If you can track how people move and interact between organizations, you can determine who someone is doing business with and even make an educated guess if that's a sale or interview.
I started writing about it almost 20 years ago: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/linkedin-intelligence-part-ii and turned it into a conference presentation called "Shattering Secrets with Social Media"
But there have been numerous proofs of concept over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage
Otherwise, LinkedIn can be quite useful in searching for a job, researching a company, or getting to know potential coworkers or hires.
Email spam is, to my mind, an inevitability. You should expect waves of spam, no matter what address you use; your email provider should offer reasonable filtering of the spam. Using a unique un-guessable email address, like any security through obscurity, can only get you so far.
Selling emails is of course bad, but expecting your email that you give to any big corporation to stay private for a long time is, alas, naïve. I've read the fine print; in most EULAs it includes a ton of clauses about sharing your contacts with a bunch of third parties, etc. LinkedIn, in particular, explicitly says that it may share your contacts with advertising partners.
In other words, if you need to enter this space, wear a hazmat suit, expect no niceties.
It identifies users that visit your site and then shows their email, phone number and living place based on their Li profile ;))
After that, I never installed it again (but too late), and I bought a second (non-smart) phone.
It vacuumed the contacts and spammed them with "Join me on WhatsApp". One of the reasons for their initial exponential growth.
Now lots of contact forms (not even necessarily job related!) are treating it as a required field. Pretty distasteful situation.
Confirmed 5 years later in media; https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-20/linkedin-...
I also saw... not sure what to call them, but honeypot friend requests? I used to get regular requests from profiles I didn't recognize with a generic pretty woman (I'd assume stock photography). Since I ignored them, they would re-request on intervals that were exactly 90 or 180 days. I occasionally glanced at them and there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to their friends. I'd assume this was also some type of scraping, probably for friends-only profile data.
Too much time / energy on your hands? You gave them a unique email ID (which is always the most sensible thing), that's it.
The non-sensible thing was to sign up kn the first place. Nobody needs these narcisstic, BS spewing pseudo-networking places.
I mean I got my last job through LinkedIn. I'm currently interviewing at a few places, half of which came from LinkedIn. So I personally clearly do need LinkedIn, unless you want to hire me.