LinkedIn, the largest professional network, is facing a lawsuit filed by four users for allegedly misusing their account information for marketing purposes.
The complainants allege that LinkedIn has mis-used information on their external email accounts and sent out endorsement mails to the contacts elisted on the mail id on their behalf. The mails forwarded sent repeated invitations to other contacts to join varied services and products on the site.
The lawsuit filed by Russ August & Kabat, Los Angeles, reads, "As a part of its effort to acquire new users, Linkedln sends multiple e-mails endorsing its products, services and brand to potential new users," reports Economic Times. "In an effort to optimize the efficiency of this marketing strategy, Linkedln sends these 'endorsement e-mails' to the list of e-mail addresses obtained without its existing users' express consent and, to further enhance the effectiveness of this particular marketing campaign, these endorsement e-mails contain the name and likeness of those existing users from whom Linkedln surreptitiously obtained the list of email addresses."
A LinkedIn user, Deborah Lagutaris, a tax preparer by profession, said to Bloomberg that more than 3000 people on her contact list received invitations from LinkedIn in her user name. When she questioned LinkedIn the company replied, "Oh, you can remove all those invitations from your account manually. We don't know what happened.'' Later, Lagutaris had to add a disclaimer to her page stating that she had not been sending out these spam mails.
The California based social networking giant has refuted the allegations saying that LinkedIn is very strict about security norms and never sends out information on a users' s behalf unless permitted by the user. An official statement by the company says, "LinkedIn is committed to putting our members first, which includes being transparent about how we protect and utilize our members' data. We believe that the legal claims in this lawsuit are without merit, and we intend to fight it vigorously."
Blake Lawlit, the senior director also made a statement on the official LinkedIn blog, "As you may have read recently, a class action lawsuit was filed against LinkedIn last week. The lawsuit alleges that we 'break into' the email accounts of our members who choose to upload their email address books to LinkedIn. Quite simply, this is not true."
The complainants have asked the company to pay them the money that it earned by using their LinkedIn accounts.
