LinkedIn is being sued by its users for allegedly hacking their external e-mail accounts for marketing purposes. The professional social networking site reportedly used the e-mail addresses to further promote the site to their Contacts.
The lawsuit has been filed by a group of users to the U.S federal court of San Jose, Calif., according to a Bloomberg report. Aside from wanting to stop LinkedIn from accessing their external e-mail accounts, they also want the company to give them a portion of the revenue it earned for using their data for marketing purposes. The exact amount wasn’t specified though.
“LinkedIn’s own website contains hundreds of complaints regarding this practice,” they said in the complaint filed Sept. 17.
According to the lawsuit, LinkedIn requires its users to provide an external e-mail address as their account username. These external e-mail addresses are being downloaded and stored in a server without authorization from the owners.
Blake Lawit, senior director for litigation of LinkedIn, posted on his blog denying the latest allegations.
“The company doesn’t access customers’ e-mail accounts without their permission, he said. Nor does LinkedIn ‘pretend’ to be a customer to gain access to the user’s e-mail account,” he said.
Furthermore, Lawit added that the company never sends invites to anyone using a user’s account without permission.
One of the evidences that the complainants have is a blog post from former LinkedIn software engineer Brian Guan describing his job as “devising hack schemes to make lots of $$$ with Java, Groovy and cunning at Team Money!” The company confirmed to Bloomberg that he was no longer connected to them since May 2012.
LinkedIn currently has 238 million members making it the largest professional social networking site. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner announcement during the second quarter earnings report saying, “This strong membership growth is due in large part to new growth optimization efforts” was also used as evidence in the lawsuit.
