Slashdot Mirror
LinkedIn Agrees To Block Stalkers
sholto writes "When Buzzfeed wrote about LinkedIn's stalker problem in June, LinkedIn claimed it had enough privacy tools "to effectively minimize unwanted connections". But a petition by a 24-year-old Ohio woman sexually assaulted by her boss and harassed through the network appears to have won the day for privacy advocates. LinkedIn said it was adding a blocking feature to protect members against stalkers. 'I can confirm that we’re in the process of building (a block feature),' responded Paul Rockwell, head of trust and safety at LinkedIn to a post in LinkedIn’s help forum called 'Stalking on LinkedIn'. 'Users on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other sites can easily block other users. LinkedIn appears to be an outlier among other top social media sites,' said petitioner Anna R."
The buzzfeed article appears to be:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/linkedin-has-a-stalker-problem
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
This has been going on for way too long.
I thought LinkedIn was just a job search tool for recruiters and the unemployed. Do people blog on that thing?
Until they do, they are not blocking the worst stalker.
Plugging your info into a public website makes that info public.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
A "stalker" label that could be applied to a user's profile--after due process resulting in an actual court order. That would get the user off linkedin, because it would become useless to him.
People need to be careful putting pictures on their Linked In account and on their Facebook etc accounts.
Google image search will quickly identify you on all the sites you use the same picture on.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
...for harassment?
Honestly, since this is a "professional" network, maybe there should be a way to note someone's lack of professionalism?
I feel like I need to explain something to people who may not use LinkedIn but use other social networks. LinkedIn has this feature that tells you when your profile has been viewed. If you have the "pro" version, it even tells you WHO has viewed your profile, unless that person has their settings set otherwise. The reason for this is because it is mostly a tool for job seekers and professionals; knowing someone has viewed your profile might be a good conversation starter at that company..
Secondly, large parts of people's profiles (namely, their work history) at LinkedIn are typically public to a large degree. This is because if you have your profile locked down to only friends, then a head hunter will never see you, so it limits the use of the service.
Now what this woman is complaining about is this. The person who harassed her would, every single day, check her LinkedIn profile. This would, in turn, send her an alert, saying that he viewed it.
What she wants LinkedIn to do, is not block him from viewing her profile - that makes no sense because her profile is public. What she wants them to do is stop having the alerts go through. IE - she doesn't seem to care that this guy can see her profile - she just doesn't want to know about it.
I can see both sides of this. From her point of view, this is just another way that this guy is causing her grief. From LinkedIn's point of view, it is a strange request and may be difficult to implement architecturally, because you want the information to remain public, and want the alerts to remain, but only not alert for this specific black-list of people.
Two separate times over a couple years I have gone into my linked-in profile and de-selected ALL the "email you this" and "email you that" options.
I kept getting email notifications for large numbers of things. (Yes, I waited 7+ days after each profile change.)
TWICE I've gone to their technical support staff. TWICE they've failed to figure out how to configure their systems to not send me e-mail notifications. The second time they flat out apologized for not being able to do it successfully, they were able to recognize that however their back end is configured and architected ... it's just impossible to do certain things.
Yeah, no, I'm not trusting private data to them.
Explain what you mean by blocking and how it would be implemented, because it doesn't work the way you seem to think it does at services like say Twitter. When you "block" someone on twitter, it does not stop that person from viewing your public tweets. All it stops them from doing is following you and sending you DM messages. They can still see all your public tweets - because they are PUBLIC. Why on earth would one care if block something to one user that is posted to the public. All they'd need to do to see it is log out of their account!
LinkedIn is in the exact same boat. Your profile on the service is public - otherwise there is no point in using it. So it makes no sense to "block" someone from viewing your public profile. All they would need to do is log out to see it.
That's a great new verb. Thank you.
I think it's great that we've found LinkedIn users besides lazy recruiters doing their trolling. LinkedIn is such a vast wasteland of nothing that I applaud the stalkers for doing something useful with it. Since joining LinkedIn a few years ago, I have discovered no useful use for the site at all. The only contacts I've ever gotten are from recruiters who search the LinkedIn database for some combination of zip code and skills and troll me.
Why wouldn't he just create another profile? Maybe one that looks like some generic recruiter at some generic recruiting company. I get notifications about people like that all the time. How can you differentiate between a stalker and the normal creepers/hr agents on linked in?
They are like rockets. You could day dream on em all day, male or female. LinkedIn should be called Slash(Cock) to clarify. I actually think LinkedIn is more useful than the news here now. F-ing liberals destroy everything.
Now what will I do for fun?
is not to use said social media site.
problem solved.
better yet, skip them all.
linkedin's value is rapidly plummeting anyway (and wasn't really worth that much at its peak either), facebook is a fucking joke, myspace is a graveyard, twitter is for twits, tumblr is for porn, youtube is for cat videos and wannabes, instagram is for self-shooters .......
life existed just fine before them and will continue just fine without them.
Hey, don't dis the cat videos! They are my life!!
Aunt Margie
Is there nothing the meatspace police can do? Stalking is stalking, regardless of the methods used. The intent is the same.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
If people are being harassed in linked.in, whats the difficult part of erasing the profile? The truth is linked.in anti-contact or anti-spam measures are largely non-existent or work very badly, or endorsements are critically flawed and you can't freeze/block/pre-aprove them because linked.in wants the network to grow as large as possible no matter what. It is their business model.