Continued from Part 1. Once again, I received another notification of a friend joining from an email I gave to the LinkedIn system. I contacted LinkedIn before writing the previous post on the topic with the following message:

For reference, your privacy policy states the following

Information about your Contacts
In order to invite others to connect with you directly in LinkedIn, you will enter their names and email addresses. This information will be used by LinkedIn to send your invitation including a message that you write. The names and email addresses of people that you invite will be used only to send your invitation and reminders.

I decided to search for accounts through your "Address Book Contacts" function, and manually entered my email contacts. I only used this function to find existing users, and not invite new ones. I expected the information to be immediately deleted from your servers, as it had no more use for the contacts I gave, but I found out today they were still there when one of said addresses was used to sign up a new account and LinkedIn informed me of such. While this is a nice feature, it would have been appropriate to allow the user to opt out of having LinkedIn keep the emails for further use, and downright shady that the user is not informed at all that given email addresses are kept by LinkedIn on your servers.

And this is the non-auto-generated response I received back 2 days later:

Dear Jeffrey
We are aware of the issue you are currently experiencing and we are working diligently to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience while this issue is being resolved.

I thought it obvious from this reply that they did not take what I said into consideration, and a high probability that they didn’t really even read it. I mentioned in the last post this exact thing happened to my friend who was trying to communicate with LinkedIn about a problem he was having with errors with their site code. This kind of thing is typical from large corporations that receive a large amount of communications and do not have the staff to handle it. I consider this practice almost as bad as out-sourced tech support (usually India), another pet peeve of mine, as communication is often hard and the tech support agents often don’t know what they are talking about... at least very much more so than when with other first-tier tech support channels provided in-country ^_^; . I went ahead and contacted eTrust a few days ago in hopes that I get a more personal response from them.