Blog post

LinkedIn reveals your personal email to your connections

LinkedIn makes the primary email address associated with an account visible to all direct connections, as well as to people who have your email address in their contacts lists. By default, the primary email address is the one that was used to sign up for LinkedIn. While the primary address may be changed to another email in your account settings, there is no way to prevent your contacts from visiting your profile and viewing there whatever email you chose to be primary. In addition, the current data archive export feature of LinkedIn allows users to download their connections’ email addresses in bulk. It seems that the archive export includes all emails associated with an account, not just the one designated as primary. It appears that many of these addresses are personal, rather than professional. This post uses the contextual integrity (CI) privacy framework to consider whether the access given by LinkedIn violates the privacy norms of using a professional online social network.

Read the full post on Freedom to Tinker blog

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