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    SOCIAL MEDIA LAW
    BLOG

    Friday, September 27, 2013

    I’d Like to Add You to My Professional Network

    by Michael Loatman

    RSS

    "I'd like to add you to my professional network." Did that LinkedIn invitation come from the executive you traded business cards with at a recent conference? Or did the professional social networking company put you together with a prospective contact after "hacking" into your friend's e-mail account, as was claimed in a recent lawsuit?

    A putative class action filed Sept. 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said LinkedIn Corp. has unlawfully extracted contact information from the e-mail accounts users provide at registration. The plaintiffs alleged LinkedIn then sends "spam" e-mails to those contacts asking them to join LinkedIn, with up to two follow-up e-mails if those friends or acquaintances do not join the social network.

    LinkedIn denied what it called the suit's "false accusations." Blake Lawit, senior director of litigation at LinkedIn, said in a Sept. 21 blog post: "We do not access your email account without your permission. Claims that we 'hack' or 'break into' members' accounts are false."

    Lawit added that invitations to join LinkedIn are only sent on a user's behalf if permission was granted to the company.

    The plaintiffs cited complaints left on LinkedIn's website as evidence that the practice occurs. They added that one user upset with the invitations said they were "actually hurting my professional reputation which is NOT the idea behind linkedin."

    Preventing LinkedIn from sending reminder e-mails to contacts is a time-consuming process, the plaintiffs alleged, because each invitation must be manually withdrawn. The complaint said withdrawing 2,000 invitations would take about 11 hours of continuous clicking on the site. If there were 800 invitations, the process would take over four hours.

    The complaint alleged, in part, that LinkedIn violated California's right to publicity, which denies unauthorized appropriation of a person's identity for advertising purposes; the state's Unfair Competition Law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200 et seq., by allegedly engaging in deceptive and fraudulent practices; and the federal Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq., by allegedly hacking users' external e-mail accounts. The plaintiffs asked the court for injunctive relief and damages.

    Copyright 2013, The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc.
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