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LinkedIn has come under fire from several security firms after the business-oriented social network rolled out a new advert scheme.
The network called it an exciting new advertising platform which delivers ads that are more useful and relevant to the user.
Targeted advertising, in other words, and an outcry went up because the new feature exposes profile information, including names and photos, along with these adverts. And no permission was sought for this from the user base, as the feature is turned on by default for everyone, Facebook style.
Yes, you can opt out, but because LinkedIn didn’t give any direct notification to its users – only a blog post went up announcing the measure – it’s likely many customers simply didn’t know about it.
BitDefender’s Catalin Cosoi, Head of the Online Threats Lab, noted that: “Users who would like to opt-out of this new feature need to visit their account settings page, choose the Account tab, and then click on the Manager Social Advertising link.”
“On the frame that pops up, they have to uncheck the LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising box.”
Cosoi added: “We advise social networking users to carefully control the information they publish on such websites in order to minimise the impact of such leaks.”
Sophos, always around to comment on security issues, also wrote a privacy violation piece on its company blog, arguing that these sort of features should always be introduced as opt-in.
They never are, however, and never will be when social media companies can still get away with doing this sort of thing. The bottom line, the income, will always be hugely more from introducing monetisation schemes as opt-out.
Sophos encouraged its’ followers to email LinkedIn and let them know their thoughts on privacy, which apparently they did, and to its’ credit the social network responded positively.
The company told Sophos: “Most importantly, what we’ve learned now is that, even though our members are happy to have their actions, such as recommendations, be viewable by their network as a public action, some of those same members may not be comfortable with the use of their names and photos associated with those actions used in ads served to their network.”
As such the pics and specific names have vanished from the ads. However, there’s no sign of LinkedIn moving to make the scheme opt-in…
And it enjoyed a brief stint with the full names/photos deal, testing the water, and making some more money that way, no doubt.
The simple fact is, social networks will keep operating in this manner because it makes financial sense, and they know they can get away with it, even if incremental retractions need to be implemented afterwards.
The bigger networks are safe in the knowledge that they effectively have a captive audience. You could leave, but then you’d risk losing touch with all those many contacts/friends.
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