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.


LinkedIn's offices in Mountain View, Calif.

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.
Joshua Gulick

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine.  A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.