Not this serious, but when I updated my position from entry level at Microsoft to CTO of a startup, LinkedIn notified all of my connections that I was now CTO of MICROSOFT.
Customer service said it was a "known issue". My friends thought it was funny, but I'm stia little annoyed because it made me look sloppy.
A few weeks ago LinkedIn posted a 4 year work anniversary for a colleague of mine who passed away 3 years ago. I complained on Twitter. They responded immediately and a few hours later they said they were taking his profile offline.
I'm not saying I have the solution to this particular problem, but it's still kind of jarring to see these kinds of updates.
This is a good opportunity for everyone to disable this feature before LinkedIn sends any news articles to your contacts about you.
Go here (https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/privacy) and turn off the setting labeled "Notifying connections when you're in the news". It's the last item in the first section. While you're still on that page, scroll to the bottom and enable two factor auth too.
This is also a good opportunity to close your LinkedIn account and never look back. Between the password thefts and algorithmically-generated libel, I have no idea why people continue to trust LinkedIn with their data and likeness.
"Choose if we can show your profile information on your employer's pages" shows "Yes" but the text below "Hide my picture and profile information from showing up in this section of a job detail page?" says "Yes". So is it showing or hiding that?
It's rather odd that their news algorithm exists in the first place.
I use LinkedIn for one reason and one reason only: to maximize my career options, both in scope and magnitude of opportunities. While I'm happily employed, I learned long ago that if you're not spending a few hours a month thinking about other career opportunities, you're hurting yourself in the long run. LinkedIn is a great platform to stay on top of that several-hours-per-month workflow.
For example, you see that an acquaintance has changed jobs....you send them a text...you grab coffee and talk about their career change....you gather the data point and keep your network primed. LinkedIn has made this process way easier to initiate than it used to be -- for me, at least.
So I really, really don't get why someone thought it would be a good idea to build an algorithm that assigns news stories to LinkedIn members. If I find myself in the news, and I think it's a cool story that makes me look good to potential employers, I can share it to my LinkedIn network. Hell, if I really like the article, I can embed it permanently on my profile.
Thank God I have a relatively rare first-last name combo that makes it very unlikely that something like what happened to Will Johnson could happen to me. That's straight-up nightmare material.
It's pretty boggling that LinkedIn would implement a feature that not only doesn't create value for its users, but actively poses a risk to their ongoing career development. The whole point of the site is essentially to serve as a cloud-mounted, data-rich business card. Why jeopardize that platform with crappy AI that spreads harmful falsehoods about members?
Yikes. I recall a few years ago having to email a bunch of news outlets to ask they reword some headlines. It seemed some sports player with the position of Wide Receiver and the surname Boyce had been misbehaving himself.
I can only imagine the explaining I would have to do if "WR Boyce indicted for child abuse" turned up on my LinkedIn feed.
I think it's so that people can congratulate you first. Think of it as the "local boy makes good" storyline. I've done that a few times when I meant to email someone, got distracted, and was reminded when their name popped up on TwitbookIn or whatever the site is now.
And you're right, "Leroy Masochist" is a rare name combo.. ;)
> "So I really, really don't get why someone thought it would be a good idea to build an algorithm that assigns news stories to LinkedIn members."
Because pushing any kind of information at users is considered "engagement", which is a term that has been so thoroughly abused that it no longer holds any substantive meaning.
Because (a) it's a thing they can do easily, and (b) the response is usually neutral or positive. Plus, with the disclaimer it would be middling difficult to sue them.
Remember that the business model here is "do the 80% that's easy and let the punters sort the rest out."
Anyone familiar with their subscription numbers? I suspect almost all of their accounts are products, not customers .
- LinkedIn sends the wrong guy's network a libelous e-mail
- Slate reports on said wrongdoing and has to issue corrections about the details [1]
- Turns out the author is a writer with a play to hawk [2]
- And the original 'White Supremacist' gets still more press than most of us want he and his organization to receive.
It all represents everything that is wrong with the web in a single post.
From the article's footnotes:
[1] *Correction, May 25, 2016: This article originally misspelled David Sacks’ last name. It also misstated that his birthday party cost $125 million. It took place in a house then being sold for $125 million. (Return.)
[2] Will Johnson is a teacher and writer based in New York City. His newest play, Blue Balls, will premiere at the Labute New Theater Festival in St. Louis this July.
How did this "Connections in the news" feature use a person's name and surname to uniquely identify them? This is appallingly asinine, as this example indicates. My name is as generic as they come, and so this is a risk for me. I wonder if LinkedIn were to group its members by name and count them, how many people (excluding those not on LinkedIn) would actually be uniquely determined by a name/surname combo? A quick search for "William Johnson" yields 7,476 results. Why didn't LinkedIn even ask this guy to confirm if he was indeed that William Johnson in the news? What an absolute fuck-up.
Did all 7486 William Johnsons on LinkedIn have that sent out to their contacts?
The top William Johnson on my LinkedIn page is black. I wonder if the algorithm cared about the race of the guy in the photo before sending out the mail. In some ways that would be even worse.
> ask this guy to confirm if he was indeed that William Johnson
I think they now ask recipients of new endorsements to confirm before they're posted. So asking for a confirmation on something as potentially damaging as a news link should be the least they do here -- and the work would be trivial (in the mathematical sense).
>Correction, May 25, 2016: This article originally misspelled David Sacks’ last name. It also misstated that his birthday party cost $125 million. It took place in a house then being sold for $125 million.
Kind of ironic, in an article about accidental identification.
It would have been even better if Slate had issued a correction explaining that the William Johnson responsible for the play Blue Balls debuting at the Labute New Theater (see author bio at the bottom) was in fact yet another William Johnson
Grown men kicking children off of a soccer field, whether they "reserved" it or not, is the most pathetic, lame thing I've heard of in a long time, and they should all be ashamed of themselves. What a bunch of losers.
> I don’t expect much from companies like LinkedIn, but when their incompetence makes our lives more difficult, they could at least pretend to care a little more.
This had the potential to do a lot more harm than just making his life "more difficult".
I don't trust LinkedIn at all. They are constantly trying to trick you into engaging just a little bit more. One example is iOS accepts of invites to connect. They use cards to show network requests. Once you've gone through the pending batch they use the same card but instead of accepting your now requesting someone or congratulating someone. It's just one of those products where you need to constantly have your guard up.
I'm lucky in that I'm pretty sure my combination of first and last name is a first in history, but I feel for the "William Johnson"s of the world. He is lucky for having there been a notification about this. He could just have easily been passed over for job offers or more after a quick search and no correspondence, just a "we're not interested."
Maybe the European "right to be forgotten" has something to it after all...
I'm not searching for a job right now, but I've decided that the next time I do, my resume will also contain a "This is me" that says what is me on HN, reddit, github, etc., and a disclaimer that anything else with that name isn't necessarily me. There are at least two other programmers that share my name, one of which even has vaguely similar programming language skills, to say nothing of all the other hits it gets. And my handle "jerf" is merely rare, not unique, and not everything that comes up under that is stuff I'm associated with either.
I'm the only living person with my name, and websites still confuse me with other people. Not only deceased people, but there's also a couple of clueless middle-aged people I've never heard of that used my gmail address to sign up for various websites - my gmail is first initial + last name, and that is not only clearly not unique but also confusing to some older people.
I have an ultra-common first and last name combination, and I've never had a problem in the job market. I don't think that it works the way you think it works.
I had an acquaintance named Mike Smith, he was black. Black men get pulled over a lot. When your name is Mike Smith every stop is a felony stop. When he married he appended his wife's last name to his own.
William Johnson is probably actually pretty safe. It's the people with names just unusual enough that no one has met more than one who have to worry.
For instance, a friend of mine has a somewhat uncommon name. Unfortunately, there's another guy (I think there's only one) on Facebook with the same name who has a borderline racist cartoon as his profile picture. Guess which one comes up first when you search on my friend's name.
> Maybe the European "right to be forgotten" has something to it after all...
All the more dangerous if you can't find out someone is a white supremacist because they've politely asked to have the internet scrubbed all the terrible things they've done.
Incredible that they would ship something so potentially damaging when they openly acknowledge that it's unreliable. It would be trivial to include an emailed request for confirmation to the subject before spamming her/his contacts. Move fast and break people's reputations!
Honestly, I have no idea what LinkedIn's strategy and long term goals are. They are supposed to a professional networking site that helps members advance their careers. Now they are trying to play the Facebook and Twitter engagement game of "growth hacking" at all costs. It works for Facebook to spam people and do all sorts of questionable stuff since they are not a professional networking site. But it is completely misguided for LinkedIn to play fast and lose.
There is a fellow with my exact name that used to live in the same town as I did, had a son with the same name as my son. He ran a startup and sold it for large dollars, but ended up with a giant IRS bill on the order of 8 figures.
And one of the fellows on my team worked for him before working for me.
Which is hilarious, but what was not so funny is that the perscriptions at Walgreens for our respective sons ended up tangled up and it took 45 minutes on the phone to straighten it out. After that, Walgreens began verifying your address.
Fortunately my story is mostly positive, unlike this poor fellow.
A libel case resulting from a situation like this could be important in setting precedent for how responsible companies need to be with (for?) their AI.
You have to code for the 99% of cases, not the 1%. You can't assume there to be more than one example of a combination of the fifth most common first name in the US and the second most common US surname. And even if that happens, you can't expect more than 1% of people to be named William Johnson, so it's better dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Linkedin's market cap is only 17 billion; they're not made of money.
I dunno, I made a joke about "White People" years ago on Twitter (something like "White People won't dance") and then Klout figured I was an expert on "White People" and sent me a free subscription to the Red Bulletin.
From the article: "The nature of profit is that you take more than you give, so it’s not surprising that these billion-dollar behemoths that call themselves startups take far more from us than we get in return."
Other commenters have weighed in on this remark, which displays a shockingly childish view of economics. But if the author believes this, then his decision to use LinkedIn can not be rational, unless his goal is to lose.
I'm not on LinkedIn, but I get emails from them all the time. I assume it's just another cesspool and con job. This guy, at some point, decided to trust them with data about him. I'm finding it hard to feel very sympathetic.
[+] [-] arcticfox|9 years ago|reply
Customer service said it was a "known issue". My friends thought it was funny, but I'm stia little annoyed because it made me look sloppy.
Come on, LinkedIn, you have one job!
[+] [-] mpeg|9 years ago|reply
"Congrats on your new role !" - No, dude, I got the promotion a year ago, it's just that I am now looking to jump ship so I updated my Linkedin
[+] [-] oalders|9 years ago|reply
I'm not saying I have the solution to this particular problem, but it's still kind of jarring to see these kinds of updates.
[+] [-] arcticfox|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syngrog66|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JaggedJax|9 years ago|reply
Go here (https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/privacy) and turn off the setting labeled "Notifying connections when you're in the news". It's the last item in the first section. While you're still on that page, scroll to the bottom and enable two factor auth too.
[+] [-] facetube|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mopoke|9 years ago|reply
http://imgur.com/8sBidJ7
"Choose if we can show your profile information on your employer's pages" shows "Yes" but the text below "Hide my picture and profile information from showing up in this section of a job detail page?" says "Yes". So is it showing or hiding that?
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroy_masochist|9 years ago|reply
I use LinkedIn for one reason and one reason only: to maximize my career options, both in scope and magnitude of opportunities. While I'm happily employed, I learned long ago that if you're not spending a few hours a month thinking about other career opportunities, you're hurting yourself in the long run. LinkedIn is a great platform to stay on top of that several-hours-per-month workflow.
For example, you see that an acquaintance has changed jobs....you send them a text...you grab coffee and talk about their career change....you gather the data point and keep your network primed. LinkedIn has made this process way easier to initiate than it used to be -- for me, at least.
So I really, really don't get why someone thought it would be a good idea to build an algorithm that assigns news stories to LinkedIn members. If I find myself in the news, and I think it's a cool story that makes me look good to potential employers, I can share it to my LinkedIn network. Hell, if I really like the article, I can embed it permanently on my profile.
Thank God I have a relatively rare first-last name combo that makes it very unlikely that something like what happened to Will Johnson could happen to me. That's straight-up nightmare material.
It's pretty boggling that LinkedIn would implement a feature that not only doesn't create value for its users, but actively poses a risk to their ongoing career development. The whole point of the site is essentially to serve as a cloud-mounted, data-rich business card. Why jeopardize that platform with crappy AI that spreads harmful falsehoods about members?
[+] [-] wrboyce|9 years ago|reply
I can only imagine the explaining I would have to do if "WR Boyce indicted for child abuse" turned up on my LinkedIn feed.
[+] [-] caseysoftware|9 years ago|reply
And you're right, "Leroy Masochist" is a rare name combo.. ;)
[+] [-] potatolicious|9 years ago|reply
Because pushing any kind of information at users is considered "engagement", which is a term that has been so thoroughly abused that it no longer holds any substantive meaning.
[+] [-] mcguire|9 years ago|reply
Remember that the business model here is "do the 80% that's easy and let the punters sort the rest out."
Anyone familiar with their subscription numbers? I suspect almost all of their accounts are products, not customers .
[+] [-] 11thEarlOfMar|9 years ago|reply
- LinkedIn sends the wrong guy's network a libelous e-mail
- Slate reports on said wrongdoing and has to issue corrections about the details [1]
- Turns out the author is a writer with a play to hawk [2]
- And the original 'White Supremacist' gets still more press than most of us want he and his organization to receive.
It all represents everything that is wrong with the web in a single post.
From the article's footnotes:
[1] *Correction, May 25, 2016: This article originally misspelled David Sacks’ last name. It also misstated that his birthday party cost $125 million. It took place in a house then being sold for $125 million. (Return.)
[2] Will Johnson is a teacher and writer based in New York City. His newest play, Blue Balls, will premiere at the Labute New Theater Festival in St. Louis this July.
[+] [-] underpantsgnome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-levin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|9 years ago|reply
The top William Johnson on my LinkedIn page is black. I wonder if the algorithm cared about the race of the guy in the photo before sending out the mail. In some ways that would be even worse.
[+] [-] philwelch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redler|9 years ago|reply
I think they now ask recipients of new endorsements to confirm before they're posted. So asking for a confirmation on something as potentially damaging as a news link should be the least they do here -- and the work would be trivial (in the mathematical sense).
[+] [-] ikeboy|9 years ago|reply
Kind of ironic, in an article about accidental identification.
[+] [-] rco8786|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimino|9 years ago|reply
Yikes.
[+] [-] tlrobinson|9 years ago|reply
Seriously? People expecting to be able to use a field they reserved using the city's official reservation system is "arrogance"?
If anyone is at fault for that incident it's the city for not getting more input from community, or subsequently not communicating the changes.
[+] [-] macintux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|9 years ago|reply
But this article is a good reminder that there are folks who don't like property rights when the wrong people have them.
[+] [-] jimbokun|9 years ago|reply
Making it available only to people who can afford to pay is very sad.
[+] [-] jlarocco|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitcher|9 years ago|reply
> I don’t expect much from companies like LinkedIn, but when their incompetence makes our lives more difficult, they could at least pretend to care a little more.
This had the potential to do a lot more harm than just making his life "more difficult".
[+] [-] brentm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm_-rf_slash|9 years ago|reply
Maybe the European "right to be forgotten" has something to it after all...
[+] [-] jerf|9 years ago|reply
I recommend this to everybody.
[+] [-] cdr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetherson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|9 years ago|reply
For instance, a friend of mine has a somewhat uncommon name. Unfortunately, there's another guy (I think there's only one) on Facebook with the same name who has a borderline racist cartoon as his profile picture. Guess which one comes up first when you search on my friend's name.
[+] [-] tetrep|9 years ago|reply
All the more dangerous if you can't find out someone is a white supremacist because they've politely asked to have the internet scrubbed all the terrible things they've done.
[+] [-] rmchugh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amichal|9 years ago|reply
Edit: Reading the entire article, it appears that is more or less what they said.
[+] [-] dmode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wglb|9 years ago|reply
And one of the fellows on my team worked for him before working for me.
Which is hilarious, but what was not so funny is that the perscriptions at Walgreens for our respective sons ended up tangled up and it took 45 minutes on the phone to straighten it out. After that, Walgreens began verifying your address.
Fortunately my story is mostly positive, unlike this poor fellow.
[+] [-] gloriousduke|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leephillips|9 years ago|reply
Other commenters have weighed in on this remark, which displays a shockingly childish view of economics. But if the author believes this, then his decision to use LinkedIn can not be rational, unless his goal is to lose.
I'm not on LinkedIn, but I get emails from them all the time. I assume it's just another cesspool and con job. This guy, at some point, decided to trust them with data about him. I'm finding it hard to feel very sympathetic.
[+] [-] tptacek|9 years ago|reply