LinkedIn refutes claims that it "hacked" users' email accounts for marketing purposes
LinkedIn is denying claims that it "hacked" email accounts provided by users during registration, as claimed in a recent class-action suit.
In the complaint filed last Tuesday in a California U.S. District Court, plaintiffs Paul Perkins, Pennie Sempell, Ann Brandwein and Erin Eggers claimed that LinkedIn “hacked” external email addresses it requested in the sign up process to “extract email addresses” of their contacts.
Court documents further alleged that LinkedIn “pretended to be” the owners of external email accounts in order to download users' contacts onto its servers for promotional use. The complaint alleged that when users entered their email addresses to use a feature that finds out who they already know on the site, that LinkedIn "attempts to hack into your email account by tunneling through any open email program on user's desktop."
