Earlier this week I started getting recruitment emails from some sort of multi-national recruitment affair.
If that sounds vague it’s because I don’t know who they are, never having signed up to them.
I know I didn’t sign up to them because, firstly, the emails came to the wrong email account. I have several; a personal one, a business/professional one and a CIPR one. Plus a live.co.uk and an Outlook one. That might be overkill, but it keeps things separate and together, if you follow. Oh, and I use my work one for work, never anything personal.
The second reason I know I didn’t sign up is that all the jobs were in the financial sector. I don’t work in finance, never have. However, my LinkedIn profile shows that my most recent ‘job’ is Treasurer of CIPR Yorkshire & Lincolnshire. And the address these emails are coming to is the one I used to join LinkedIn.
And, most annoyingly, my email address is shown on my profile. By default. And with no obvious way to turn it off, delete or otherwise hide it. You have to wonder what the point of InMail is then!
Since the emails say that I subscribed on 18 October, and since the site has a privacy and data controller statement on it, I thought I’d do the decent thing and ask them when and where I signed up (having explained first why it was highly unlikely that I did). I look forward to reading what they report, assuming they can be arsed to report anything.
I know what these scoundrels are like; you unsubscribe, they put you on a list of addresses that have unsubscribed (and which, therefore, must exist) and sell that list on to another outfit.
But I’m going to pin this one squarely on LinkedIn’s shoulders; your email address shouldn’t be visible unless you want it to be, there should be an obvious option to toggle that on or off, and it shouldn’t be on by default.
According to LinkedIn’s help though, my email address is only visible to my connections… in which case, someone is in for a whole heap of effluent when I work out who.
“Gary, you’re the boss of your account.” Not so much, it seems.