Users Sue LinkedIn Over Harvesting of E-Mail Addresses

Several LinkedIn users have filed a lawsuit accusing the business-oriented social network of accessing their e- mail accounts without permission, harvesting the addresses of their contacts and spamming those people with repeated invitations to join the service.

Those users have asked a federal judge in San Jose, California, to bar the company from repeating the alleged violations and to force it to return any revenue stemming from its use of their identities to promote the site to non-members, according to a court filing.

"When users sign up for LinkedIn they are required to provide an external email address as their username and to setup a new password for their LinkedIn account. LinkedIn uses this information to hack into the user's external email account and extract email addresses," the complaint reads. "LinkedIn is able to download these addresses without requesting the password for the external email accounts or obtaining user' consent."

Here's what Linkedin senior director of litigation Blake Lawit wrote in a blog post:

"We do not access your email account without your permission. Claims that we 'hack' or 'break into' members' accounts are false. We never deceive you by 'pretending to be you' in order to access your email account. We never send messages or invitations to join Linkedin on your behalf to anyone unless you have given us permission to do so."

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