On Thursday 15 Oct 2009, Gora Mohanty wrote: > I am not averse to the idea of working together, through sites > similar to LinkedIn. However, I am very much opposed to what > seems to have become de riguer for such social networking sites, > where they actively seek to sucker new users into exposing more > email addresses that they can unscrupulously harvest. Because of > this, I refuse to use LinkedIn, even though they are apparently > a very useful site. > > I also think that it is incumbent on people to be aware of such > practices by social networking sites that they subscribe to. If > they choose to open all contacts in their email box to such > spammers, in my opinion, they share the blame for the spam that > results. The "punishment" in this case is also ridiculously trivial, > so there is hardly any reason to complain.
Er, what makes you think that once you've revealed your e-mail ID and password to linkedin (or equivalent site) they won't use, abuse and misuse it for their own hidden agenda? Yes, yes, the web site claims that they'll forget your password eventually, but any web site can make any claim without actually adhering to it. Further, linkedin (and other anti-social networking sites) are now ripe targets for various mafiosi- type attacks (remember Twitter got haxqu0red a couple of weeks back?) and you can be absolutely sure that when a band of gun-toting coke- crazed hoods gets hold of your contacts and presumably your password they're not going to be agonising over whether to misuse that data or not. There is also the whole value-raising question, where the promoters of every site try to raise the value of the site; traditionally this was done (roughly) by counting registered users, at, say, $1 per user or so. Now if I were promoting linkedin I'd make damn sure that I kept users' passwords with me, so that when MS tries to buy me out they pay me $1 per registered user and, under the table, another $100 per validated user password! In short, giving your e-mail ID password to someone you don't know from Ali is an excellent way to show the world that you don't have a clue about security and can't be trusted with sensitive data. Regards, -- Raju -- Raj Mathur r...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
