I just accepted an invitation from a coworker on LinkedIn; when I did so, it presented me with a list of “People You May Know”.
The creepy thing was that I do in fact know about half of them, but I can’t figure out how LinkedIn knows that. If it could go through my address book or e-mail, it could find those names, but I would hope that my web browser wouldn’t have access to my .bbdb file or my Gnus save folder, and even if it did it wouldn’t know what to do with them. (At least the former.) Many of the names are familiar from Yahoo groups; do they have some deal with Yahoo where they share that information? Is there some other mechanism that I’m missing? They could try crawling from my web pages, but I don’t see how they’d find most of those names that way, either. Or they could just search the web in general for e-mails where one of us replies to the other? Very odd.
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AFAIK it is just listing people who were at the same college or employer that you were at roughly the same time.
8/27/2007 @ 3:45 am
That’s what it looked like in the past, but not this time: for some of the people, they’re perhaps doing an exceedingly good job of picking somebody whom I overlapped employement with, but in other cases I (as far as I know) don’t have any common college or employment history.
8/27/2007 @ 7:51 am
Perhaps they are simply mining their own data? If you have lots of links in common with someone else, there’s a good chance you actually know them.
8/27/2007 @ 5:39 pm
The thing is, I didn’t have any links in common with these people. Essentially all my previous connections were coworkers from Kealia/Sun or people I know through Oberlin. But LinkedIn showed me somebody I know through my daughter’s school, and somebody whose blog I read and whom I see on one or two of the XP/lean mailing lists.
The former and I overlapped in employment at Stanford for a couple of years, but that doesn’t distinguish her from hundreds of other people. The latter and I have no common employment/education history. And we have no connections in common that LinkedIn should know about.
8/29/2007 @ 7:16 pm
I ran across this entry when searching for an answer about how LinkedIn creates the “People you may know” list because I ran into the exact same situation. I accepted an invitation from former coworker and noticed the list. The three people on my list are not linked to any other connections I have. They share no employment history with me and did not go to any school that I went to. I can’t find any way that LinkedIn should suggest these three people. I do know these three people socially. I’m a bit worried that LinkedIn is using information from outside their system to suggest links, possibly even using spyware or some other method to take information from my PC. I couldn’t find any mention in their help about how they create this list.
8/30/2007 @ 6:13 pm
I’ve been wondering the same thing, and here’s my best guess: the people you see on the list have uploaded _their_ email address books to linkedin, and your e-mail address was in their address book. Therefore, LinkedIn thinks you have a potential link with them. Would that explain what we’re seeing here?
9/9/2007 @ 3:51 pm
Huh, that’s an interesting theory. Makes sense to me…
9/9/2007 @ 4:56 pm
Another guess, the people appearing in the list may have seen your profile multiple times.
9/24/2007 @ 9:33 pm
I just stumbled into this site while searching for the mystery of “People You May Know” list. I went back and forth with customer service people at LinkedIn for the same issue after getting a “People You May Know†list of people whose email addresses are stored only in my Gmail account.
First, they said that they scan information from the contact list in your Outlook. But I have never emailed these people from the Outlook. Then they suggested that these people may be in my “Other Contact” list on the web site, but I have no one on my “Other Contact†and they have no relation to people on “My Contact” list. After asking if they get information from my Gmail account, I received following email today.
Dear Dignan,
I apologize for the delayed response. We greatly appreciate your
patience. This has since been filed this issue as a bug with our
engineering department. If you notice any additional unusual symptoms on
your account, or require additional assistance, please let us know.
Thank you,
Pat Baynes
Customer Support Professional
How could this be a “bug†issue? I think the explanation of Andy above is probably what they are doing. Then why don’t they just say so?
9/28/2007 @ 1:34 pm
Wow. Like the rest of you I ended up here due to the same reason. I had two people that I know listed, and albeit I knew both of them (though I have never worked with them). One I met at a networking event over a year and a half ago, and the second I interviewed with. I have had contact with both via email (from my gmail account), so I am only left to guess that they can scan that info.
Scary…
10/1/2007 @ 2:06 pm
Yeah, I’m seeing the same thing…in spades. I’ve had 2 people suggested to me with whom my _only_ link is that I went on a few dates with each of them 2+years ago. Ages, schools, industries are all different, and we have different zip codes as well.
The explanation above is a good one – maybe they uploaded their address books. If so, I’m glad that nothing blossomed with either of them, ’cause what kind of yonk uploads their address book to some online networking service, even a relatively good, apparently not-evil one like Linkedin?
10/12/2007 @ 4:09 pm
I’m having a hard time imagining any way they’re getting this info other than somehow hacking into our own contacts. I used a work email address that I don’t use with any of my friends, period, and also only have a barebones profile that lists only my current employer. I basically don’t use LinkedIn, but signed up because someone invited me, and put nothing more than my current city of residence and employer.
Now I’m being told I “may know” people I went to college with, used to work with, partied with, _bought stuff from_, and other connections completely unrelated to anything listed in my profile (I have no schools, no former employers, no former locations — nothing whatsoever). The only thing all of these people conceivably have in common is that I have emailed them from a personal account other than the one I used to sign up for LinkedIn with. My hunch is that what they’re doing probably isn’t legal.
10/17/2007 @ 2:31 pm
When i started my LinkedIn account, I didnt fill in real information. I made up fake titles and positions etc. I had only a few contacts(5 I think).
And yet, like everyone here, Linked in found out some of the most amazing degrees of separation to suggest people I knew. It has about a 60% success rate.
So, whatever they’re doing, it has to be getting information from outside Linkedin. I asked one of the suggested friends if they had every searched for me, and they said no, as they would have asked for me as a friend if they had. And, as mentioned, I had barely any friends and none of them could possibly have had a path to her.
While it is a bit creepy, I have to say, I’m exceedingly impressed by it.
10/25/2007 @ 5:20 am
OK, lets add one more thing. Ebay must be involved.
There is someone in my “May know’ list that my only link to them is Ebay. In fact, this is someone that stole from me on Ebay(took money, never delivered goods, delayed me past the 28 day complaint limit so I never got my money back either).
They only have 1 contact.
Other than Ebay, I’ve never posted anything about him, and I cant imagine that he’s putting my name anywhere. And that email address was different to the one in linkedin.
So, what we’re probably looking at here is a complete internet sampling of information(like a search engine) and then looking for any links. Jack Bauer/CTU would be impressed.
10/25/2007 @ 6:36 am
It’s nice to find so many people sharing my worries. Linkedin found one of my former roommates (we just lived together 3 weeks…), to whom I didn’t have any other connection than this, and a guy I went to a music summer school with, 5 years ago. I asked them both if they had looked for me on linkedin, or uploaded their contacts, but they both said no. I emailed them both from my gmail account — and linkedin never ever found a contact unrelated to school or work, that I had not emailed. This is really scary for me. Perhaps gmail is evil after all???
Found a link here with somebody also sharing the gmail coincidence thing.
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/information-technology/information-storage/TCH_ITS_IST/59136-2897253
In any case, this is creepy. I dont find this cool at all. People should never be able to know who I emailed from my gmail account. If I wasnt that addicted to gmail, I would stop using it altogether; and I perhaps should stop anyway even if it’s a dear part of my everyday life.
12/10/2007 @ 10:30 pm
I’m so glad to have found this. I too have received entirely plausible but weird recommendations: someone I knew in high school, in England, with whom I remain friends, but have no professional contact and a mother of another kid in my child’s high-school band. I’ve exchanged emails with these people, but there’s absolutely nothing to link us professionally.
This is creepy. Someone suggested to me that maybe intermediate email servers are selling their information to LinkedIn so that they can make connections between senders and recipients of emails. Any thoughts?
Thanks
12/24/2007 @ 12:04 pm
Yeah, this is too much for me. I’m deleting my LinkedIn profile. I tried emailing privacy at linkedin dot com, and they were no help. They are just way to hedgy on this for me to be comfortable. I don’t need them to tell me how they did it, but if they could assure me how they didn’t do it, I’d feel a little better. I didn’t really have a need for this anyway.
Glad to see I’m not the only one worried about this.
1/29/2008 @ 10:13 am
Same story here, but I know for sure that two of the people on my list were people with whom I exchanged _one e-mail_ each. In both cases, the person was a friend of a friend (of a friend) with whom I participated in a brief multiple-party e-mail exchange, and in both cases both he and I sent one e-mail to the group. They both have gmail accounts. I’m guessing that if you import contacts from gmail, they’ll find and store anyone who’s had a two-way e-mail exchange with you. Then, they’ll use that info to add you to the other person’s “People you may know” list. I think that may be a violation of their privacy policy (see below) but the wording’s ambiguous.
From the LinkedIn privacy policy:
“… You may also choose to manually enter or upload data about your contacts into the private “My Contacts” section of our website. All information entered there will only be viewable by you and will not be searchable by others in the LinkedIn network without your permission.”
6/2/2008 @ 3:24 pm
Yep… Add me to the list. Complete invasion of privacy. Even if these people did add their address book to their profile’s potential contacts, this stupid behavior should not impact me. This is supposed to be a professional network and it is using low level strategy to try to grow, including this type of freaking trick.
bye bye linkedin!
1/13/2010 @ 7:32 am
I think what you will find is linkedin analyzing overlapping contact lists. It gets all the contacts of my contacts and looks at their contacts.
My contact is aunt mary. In Aunt Mary’s contact list is J. Smith. In J. Smith’s contact list is M Jones.
M Jones shows up lnked to another one of my contacts …. therefore M jones shows up in People you may know
6/6/2010 @ 9:41 am