Andre Yoskowitz
21 Sep 2013 21:56
LinkedIn, the world's most popular professional-networking site, has been sued this week by customers who are accusing the site of "appropriating their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts' addresses."
The customers hope to make the suit into a group class action, and have asked a federal judge to ban the company from repeating the same alleged violations. Additionally, they are demanding that LinkedIn return "any revenue stemming from its use of their identities to promote the site to non-members" and they are seeking additional damages.
As part of their complaint, the customers cite that even "LinkedIn's own website contains hundreds of complaints regarding this practice." LinkedIn has over 230 million users and has seen rapid growth in recent years.
"LinkedIn is committed to putting our members first, which includes being transparent about how we protect and utilize our members' data," says LinkedIn, which has vowed to fight the 'meritless' suit.
The complaint says that LinkedIn required all members to provide an email address as their username on the site, and then used that information to access those email accounts, in an effort to steal contacts. "LinkedIn pretends to be that user and downloads the e-mail addresses contained anywhere in that account to LinkedIn's servers," they added. "LinkedIn is able to download these addresses without requesting the password for the external e-mail accounts or obtaining users' consent."
Blake Lawit, the company's senior director of litigation, says the allegations are not true. "We never send messages or invitations to join LinkedIn on your behalf to anyone unless you have given us permission to do so," Lawit says.