Although the
LinkedIn social networking tool for professional contacts has been around for a while, it has recently gained some free publicity due to it's initial stock offering. The sudden rise in popularity has resulted in an unfortunate increase in LinkedIn "invitations" that don't always go to their intended recipients, sometimes "spamming" large groups of people at once. The problem is twofold.
First, if you use LinkedIn, please be aware that the giant "login" box on the front page is not a login box (in fact you will only see it if you are already logged in). It accesses your email account address book (on gmail, hotmail, yahoo or whatever) and automatically sends invitations to everyone in your address book. That may include everyone to whom you ever wrote or replied. LinkedIn should at the very least make this more explicit; as it currently stands it is somewhat misleading. It's also highly recommended that you use different passwords for different web sites; doing so can prevent you from accidentally giving away your email account contact list to LinkedIn since the passwords won't match.
Second, if you
do not use LinkedIn and plan never to use LinkedIn, you can request that your email
address be blocked by following these instructions. Staff at Rutgers who use group email addresses (such as a student mailing list for a course, or a department address like info@
brokenmail.rutgers.edu please replace brokenmail with ctaar.rutgers.edu) may want to use this to stop invitations from going to the group - especially if (like us) you use that address to send out mailings to staff or students and will end up in a large number of address books that may get "stolen" by LinkedIn or accidentally provided to them.
