Adblock Plus and (a little) more

Closed my LinkedIn account · 2012-06-08 16:30 by Wladimir Palant

A bunch of posts on Planet Mozilla reminded me that there is still one social network that I am a member of. So it was time to reconsider whether having a LinkedIn account was worth it.

Pros:

• I get to play the same “I have sooooo many contacts” game as everybody else.
• I have a place to remind me of people who I worked with 10 years ago but who weren’t interesting enough to remember.
• If I need to point somebody to my past experience I can simply give them a link (not that I’ve ever done that).
• My friends get informed about my career advancements without having to talk to me.
• There is a chance that I will get a great job offer because somebody sees my LinkedIn profile and is impressed (unfortunately, the chance to get contacted by a head hunter who simply contacts everybody is significantly higher).
• LinkedIn shows somewhat more respect for my privacy than Facebook and most other social networks.

Cons:

• My profile page keeps nagging me about my profile being “incomplete”. No, that page already has too much of my information and I’m not feeding it more.
• I regularly get invitations to connect to some people who I don’t know. I used to answer, then I gave up and started ignoring them. But to ignore I have to log in and click “Ignore”, otherwise LinkedIn will continue sending me reminders. So I changed the settings to allow requests only from people knowing my email address. With my email address not exactly hard to find some are still coming through however.
• LinkedIn just confirmed leaking at least 6.5 million user passwords. And they seriously used unsalted hashes. Now I use a unique password for each site but having my friends spammed through my LinkedIn account still wouldn’t be great.
• Did I really say that they respect my privacy? At least their mobile app doesn’t and the official explanation doesn’t sound too plausible.

Having considered all this I decided to close my LinkedIn account. Has been fun eight years ago when I opened it, not any more. If you need to get in touch with me — there are still plenty of ways.

Tags: mozilla off-topic

Comment [6]

1. Pirlouy · 2012-06-08 19:52 · #

   Selfish. It means you don’t and probably did never care about the life of your “friends”. :D
   Kidding of course, but it’s a point to consider when closing an account.

2. Szero · 2012-06-09 21:04 · #

   Off-topic to this topic.

   Is ABP becoming an abandoned product ? Something a normal thinking creature could already have foreseen the moment the ABP author decided to start wandering the commercial route ?

   There haven’t been the slightest updates for months.

   Is it some kind of “commercial” step to slowly but certainly letting the ABP project bleed dead, so people will abandon it ?

3. Szero · 2012-06-09 22:03 · #

   The truth is always eager to be hidden.

   Reply from Wladimir Palant:

   As it says above the comment form: “Please note that comments not related to this blog post will be removed.” And – if you wanted a reply you should have at least entered an email address (or simply sent me an email).

4. Anon · 2012-06-10 20:07 · #

   Worse, their website is asking me to enter my email password on a non-SSL page.

5. Wholesale Kitchen Cabinets · 2012-06-21 13:42 · #

   Such matters are give invitations to fake things .

6. dirty harry · 2012-07-13 12:05 · #

   another greedy corporation only interested in spying and profiling you for their own gain.

   glad you left, i hope others follow your lead

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