Expert: Carolyn Meinel - 9/16/2011

Question
QUESTION: I registered at LinkedIn, in order to accommodate a couple of friends who asked me to link to them.  Since then, the website has suggested many other people to whom I might wish to link. All of them are known to me, and I've had email contact (gmail) with most - but not all - of them. I use the Zone Alarm firewall and Microsoft Security Essentials. How do they get those names?!

ANSWER: I do not know the details of how Linkedin works. All I can tell you is that on my LinkedIn account, the suggested connections all are people who are already connected to other people in my existing network (the "2nd" button by their names). If LinkedIN is displaying suggested connections that don't have either 2nd or 3rd after their names, I would be interested in hearing from you about this.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: To the best of my recollection, all of the dozen or so names that LinkedIn suggested were people that I had gmailed and/or googled, in connection with a genealogy project.  None of them are linked to either of the two people to whom I'm linked, and it's very unlikely that any two of them are linked to each other.  Interestingly, one is a cousin to me and one of my links, and LinkIn knows that the three of us know each other. Just today, I got an email from LinkedIn with four names of people who have no conceivable connection to each other.  The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that LinkedIn is getting the names from Google. That's creepy, considering that it's personally identifyable information.

Answer
That is interesting information. LinkedIn does have a feature where you can connect it to your Gmail account to advise you of who among your email contacts is also on LinkedIn. If you did not authorize LinkedIn to examine your Gmail contacts, then, yes, this sounds creepy to me, too. Sorry, I don't know how they would do this.

Here's something explaining how to improve your privacy settings on LinkedIn. I hope it helps. Also, I suggest you report your findings to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, http://epic.org