LinkedIn has moved to clarify accusations that accesses the email accounts of users.
In a statement, Blake Lawit, senior director of litigation at LinkedIn responded to media claims which reported that users has sued the social network after accusing it of hacking into their external email accounts and downloading contacts’ addresses.
According to arstechnica, four plaintiffs filed a class-action suit in US district court in San Jose on Friday claiming that LinkedIn used its member’s identities without consent and broke into their third party email accounts to send promotional emails to the members’ contact lists.
The 46-page complaint details instances where users complained to LinkedIn about this practice, especially in instances where LinkedIn sent e-mails to “the addresses of spouses, clients, opposing counsel, etc.”
The compliant said: “If a LinkedIn user leaves an external email account open, LinkedIn pretends to be that user and downloads the email addresses contained anywhere in that account to Linkedln’s servers. LinkedIn is able to download these addresses without requesting the password for the external e-mail accounts or obtaining users’ consent.”
However Lawit’s statement denied this, saying that “ this is not true” and calling accusations that it hacks into email accounts as false. He also said that it never deceive users by “pretending to be you” in order to access your email account, or send messages or invitations to join LinkedIn on your behalf to anyone unless you have given us permission to do so.
“As we’ve said before, our core value at LinkedIn is Members First. This guides all the decisions that we make when it comes to our members, including how we communicate with them and how we use their data. That’s why we felt we needed to explain we believe that the claims in this lawsuit are without merit, and we wanted to correct the false accusations and misleading headlines,” he said.
