Yup, I’m firing LinkedIn. I almost called this, “LinkedIn, I quit”, until I remembered that they are providing me with a service, so the firing metaphor is more apt. Particularly considering they’re really all about getting people jobs.
And it’s not as though LinkedIn has been totally useless to me. I’ve found a job through LinkedIn, coincidentally interviewing with a former classmate. My long-time tagline, “Minor PHP deity/aspiring system administrator/technorenaissance man” was referred to by my hiring manager at my current job as part of why he hired me. Whether it was because it demonstrated my sense of humour or my confidence, or even just a joke, I’ll probably never know. But the point is, LinkedIn has its uses.
The problem is in their customer service—more accurately, their almost-total lack of customer service. First of all, when you have a problem, you are functionally prevented from submitting a question to their help desk without first making a cursory look in their knowledge base. Seems sort of fair, until you remember that, sometimes, you know going into it that your issue isn’t covered by a question: there are problems that come up that quite simply need a human being to resolve. So there’s a barrier to getting the help you need, and when you consider it a little further, implies that they don’t have enough staff working their help desk. This point, in fact, gets demonstrated later on.
The second barrier to getting help, once you’ve actually made it to their “Contact Us” page, is that, once you’ve typed out your question, a modal dialog pops up, where it performs a keyword search in its knowledge base for you, presumably based on your summary of your issue. JavaScript sets the browser caret on the button labelled “I Found My Answer”, which redirects away from the page. When you click the Back button in your browser, your question is gone. This is yet another attempt to obstruct users from getting the help they need, and another vivid illustration of just how understaffed their help desk is. To describe it as “poor user experience” is a bit insufficient.
So, just in order to get to the point where you have successfully asked a question, LinkedIn has done everything they can to prevent you from doing so. During the most recent occasion when I had to submit a ticket, I actually muttered at the website, “I hate you so much, I wish I could hate you to death.” I know, I know, it’s not really my line, but Goddamn if it isn’t evocative of the particular type of impotent rage you feel when you’re already mad at something that you can’t really take out your anger on, and it thwarts you.
Now, all that being said… what are the problems I’ve had so far with LinkedIn? Leaving out their comically bad response to the infamous Gawker Media password crack—resetting everyone’s password—there have been three:
- Recommending connections to contacts from my email
- Continuing to send Groups emails to an email address I (thought I had) removed from my account
- Automatically connecting me to someone hours after they requested a connection
Support History » Why is LinkedIn accessing my email account?!
Your Question 04/26/2010 23:42I just received my weekly LinkedIn network update, letting me know that a person I regularly email has just joined LinkedIn.. which seems somewhat strange to begin with, since this person has little reason, that I know of, to use LinkedIn.
What really set off a flag for me, though, is the fact that LinkedIn *knew that I know this person*. I have *never* instructed LinkedIn to import my contacts from my webmail services, and never intend to. So why is it that LinkedIn is suggesting that I add people from my Google Mail contact list to my LinkedIn network?
Before this event, I have been particularly satisfied with LinkedIn’s service; I’ve been able to keep in touch with colleagues, make new connections with recruiters, and in one instance I was able to secure a job because of it. It’s quite valuable to me, but if the service can’t do something simple like respect my privacy, I may have to leave the service and tell everyone I know that uses it precisely why I left.
The contact in question’s email address is [REDACTED]
Thank you. I hope to hear from someone promptly regarding this matter.
LinkedIn Response 05/01/2010 11:21
Dear Matthew,
Thank you for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support.
Please be assured that LinkedIn would never access your address book or import contacts without your permission. Our policies require all members to enter a password any time an address book is imported or other actions are taken on the account. My records show that you have imported some contacts into your LinkedIn account at some point in time. One of those contacts is the one in question. You can see the contacts you have imported if you log into your account and click on “imported Contacts” under “Contacts”. Please know that you can delete imported contacts at any time by selecting contacts and clicking on the "Delete selected contacts" button.
If you have further questions, please feel free to reply to this message.
Roberta
LinkedIn Customer Support
Support History » Remove secondary email
Your Question 01/23/2012 23:47I attempted to remove [REDACTED] as an email associated with my LinkedIn account a couple of months, preferring [REDACTED] as my email address, due to a brief security compromise of my Google Mail account.
I’ve noticed over the last little while that I’m still receiving email from LinkedIn at the old address. Nowhere in my settings does it indicate that you’re storing the other address, until I came in here to contact you and I found it as a secondary email address.
Remove this address from my account immediately. If this cannot be done, then it must be exposed as my alternate email address within my account settings, so that I might change it to another alternate email address.
LinkedIn Response 01/24/2012 01:06
Hi Matthew,
Thanks for your email letting me know that you still receiving emails to your old email address and I understand how concerned you must be about this matter.
I’m able to locate the account and see that there’s only one associated email address [REDACTED] which have 166 connections. I’ve tried to locate the account with the email address [REDACTED] mentioned, but I couldn't find any account on our records.
[I continue to receive LinkedIn Groups emails at the old address to this day. –ed.]
However, if you want me add your old email address to our “Do Not Contact List” in order to stop receiving emails in future. Please reply to my message so that I’ll be glad to proceed with your request further.
Matthew, I await for your response.
Regards,
Susheel
LinkedIn Customer Service.
Support History » Unauthorized connection
Your Question 11/07/2012 20:44At 7 November 2012, 12:34 AM EST, I received an email notification from LinkedIn, informing me that “[REDACTED]” would like to connect with me. I received another email at 1:51 AM EST, suggesting that I see what [REDACTED] has been up to, because we had now become connected.
I did not authorize this action. In point of fact, I did not know of either email until I woke up this morning and checked my email. I can only assume that either some device in my house performed the authorization on my behalf, or that this authorization was committed fraudulently. Accordingly, I insist that you divulge all the logs you have respecting this authorization, and with the original request made by [REDACTED] that the two of us connect, so that I can verify that the request did not come from any device in my possession.
Please note that this is not the first problem I have had with LinkedIn. As you can surely see from my support case history, I also have reason to believe that some process of yours gained access to my Google Mail account without my permission. Despite the support representative's insistence that I must have kicked it off myself, the fact is, I disagree with such “helpful” services on general principle and would never have done so. I have also had no end of difficulty purging my other email address from systems. I continue to receive LinkedIn Group notifications at my past email address, despite a support rep’s insistence that the old email address has been purged from your systems.
Your Response 11/13/2012 14:38
And now I’ve just discovered I had apparently followed PwC Consulting?! What the fuck, guys. This shit has to stop.
LinkedIn Response 11/20/2012 14:29
Hi Matthew,
There are a couple of scenarios that could explain the possibility of unauthorized access to a LinkedIn account:
1. If you’ve recently logged into your account from a public computer and didn’t completely sign out of your account, the next person to access the site on that computer may have unintentionally logged into your account.
2. If you share a computer with another person either at your workplace or home and didn’t completely sign out of your account, the next person to access the site on that computer may have unintentionally logged into your account.
3. Your account has been compromised by someone with malicious intent.
In order to secure your account, we have taken the following actions:
1. We signed you out of your account from every computer it has ever been accessed on. This will now prompt a new login for your account.
2. We sent a password reset link to the primary email address listed on your account.
We also like to recommend these best practices for your online privacy:
1. Always completely sign out of your LinkedIn account each time you leave a computer.
2. Don’t use the same password on multiple websites. If fraudsters identify your password, they can use it to access your other accounts.
3. Select passwords that can't easily be guessed. Create one that includes 10 or more characters. Hint: Think of a meaningful phrase or quote and turn it into a complex password using the first letter of each word in the sentence and add more complexity by adding capital letters, punctuation and symbols.
4. Never give your password to others or write it down.
If you continue to see anything suspicious, please report it to us immediately.
Regards,
Andrea
LinkedIn Trust & Safety
Two canned responses! It’s like they aren’t even trying. You can see that I didn’t bother responding to any of the tickets; there was demonstrably no point, since they weren’t putting forth any effort to resolve the issue in the first place. But then, maybe that’s what they’re trained to do.
Like I said above, I’m firing LinkedIn. Exactly what form that will take on LinkedIn’s servers, I have yet to decide. I want to leave a link to this article there, so that anyone who looks me up can read about my awful experience, but I also want to retain the maximum possible visibility—which would mean maintaining all my connections and job history. Decisions, decisions.
LinkedIn, consider this your two weeks’ notice.
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