LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD), owner of the world’s most popular professional-networking website, was sued by customers who claim the company appropriated their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts’ addresses.
The customers, who aim to lead a group suit against LinkedIn, asked a federal judge in San Jose, California, to bar the company from repeating the alleged violations and to force it to return any revenue stemming from its use of their identities to promote the site to non-members, according to a court filing.
“LinkedIn’s own website contains hundreds of complaints regarding this practice,” they said in the complaint filed Sept. 17, which also seeks unspecified damages.
LinkedIn claims to have the largest online professional network with more than 238 million members, including executives from every Fortune 500 company. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner is quoted in the complaint as saying on a second quarter earnings call, “This strong membership growth is due in large part to new growth optimization efforts.”
LinkedIn fell 2.1 percent yesterday in New York Stock Exchange trading to close at $243.90.
Doug Madey, a spokesman for Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, said the lawsuit is without merit and the company will fight it.
“LinkedIn is committed to putting our members first, which includes being transparent about how we protect and utilize our members’ data,” he said yesterday in an e-mail.
LinkedIn required the members to provide an external e-mail address as their username on its site, then used the information to access their external e-mail accounts when they were left open, according to the complaint.
‘LinkedIn Pretends’
“LinkedIn pretends to be that user and downloads the e-mail addresses contained anywhere in that account to LinkedIn’s servers,” they said. “LinkedIn is able to download these addresses without requesting the password for the external e-mail accounts or obtaining users’ consent.”
LinkedIn software engineer Brian Guan described his role on the company’s website as “devising hack schemes to make lots of $$$ with Java, Groovy and cunning at Team Money!” according to the complaint. Java is a programming language and computing platform released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. Groovy is a another language for the Java platform.
The plaintiffs, who are seeking a jury trial, provided a link to the engineer’s post,http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianguan, which they said they last visited Sept. 13.
Added Disclaimer
Instead, she said she added a disclaimer to her LinkedIn page saying she hadn’t sent the invitations.
Jeffrey Barr of Livingston, New Jersey, said in an e-mail that he estimated LinkedIn used as many as 200 names and e-mail addresses of his contacts, inviting them to connect with him on the site.
“Some of the people I hadn’t talked to in five to 10 years, including several old girlfriends I had forgotten to delete,” he said.
LinkedIn told him he hadn’t unchecked a default setting allowing it to use the e-mails, he said.
According the complaint, it was part of LinkedIn’s growth initiative also to send multiple e-mails endorsing its products, services, and brand to potential new users, following up with additional messages to people who didn’t sign on.
The existing users have no way to stop the process, the plaintiffs said.
“These ‘endorsement e-mails’ are sent to e-mail addresses taken from LinkedIn users’ external e-mail accounts including the addresses of spouses, clients, opposing counsel, etc.,” according to the complaint.
‘Your Permission’
The actions were taken even though LinkedIn assures its users when they log in, “We will not e-mail anyone without your permission,” the plaintiffs said.
“LinkedIn’s appropriation of e-mail addresses to send multiple reminder e-mails promoting its service is motivated by monetary gain,” they said.
Source : Bloomberg
No comments