After Backlash, LinkedIn Brings Back Contact Export Feature

After user complaints, LinkedIn has re-enabled the contact export feature that they recently disabled. On the one hand, good. Any modern social network should absolutely have a contacts and data export feature. This seems like another one of a series of irritating steps LinkedIn has gradually been taking to lock down their platform, limit access to formerly open data, and paywall the crap out of a truly useful service. At this point, it’s basically Facebook lite unless you pay for the premium features they didn’t used to restrict.

However, I suspect the reason they removed that feature was to combat spam and the fake profiles that mass-connect to people and harvest their email addresses. After having my LinkedIn-only email alias sold to spammers by my LinkedIn connections, I only see this getting worse. At this point I auto-reject all connection requests that aren’t in English, and carefully scrutinize requests from Russia, China, and the Middle East because they usually have the most fake-looking profiles that I can’t verify through common connections. I’m curious how they’ll choose to combat this moving forward.

(from Jon Jones, Tech Geek via IFTTT)