LinkedIn Denies Accusation That It Hacked Customer Email Accounts

Forget the usual, “We can’t comment on pending litigation” line that companies often employ when accused of wrongdoing. LinkedIn took to its blog this weekend to rebut claims by some of its users that the company broke into their personal email accounts and accessed their contact lists without permission.

A group of LinkedIn users brought the class action lawsuit in San Jose, Calif., claiming that LinkedIn harvested email addresses from their personal email contact lists and then contacted some of those email accounts. LinkedIn’s Blake Lawit took to the official LinkedIn Blog yesterday to give the company’s take on the matter, which is straightforward: LinkedIn doesn’t access email accounts or send messages to contacts without a user’s permission. “We never deceive you by ‘pretending to be you’ in order to access your email account,” Lawit asserts in the post.