Security Issue: Prune your contact list!

Ladies (and I'm sure the gents as well), in the last week I have received invitations from two different providers to link to them on LinkedIn, a professional networking site, but the invitation came from their real-life civilian identities.

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc give you the option to upload your contact list from Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, etc, allowing the site to look for matching addresses already registered, and to hook you up with people you know already on the site. It works great, in fact, too good. If there isn't a match, these sites (in this case LinkedIn) emails ALL the addresses and invites you to create an account to link to the person inviting you, thus increasing their membership.

I have received two invites to my hobby email to do just this. I happen to have a professional account on the site, so I logged into it and searched these names to see who in the hell is mixing professional life with my hobby email. Turns out in both cases, I knew them as providers. Now I am seeing their REAL NAMES and PROFESSIONAL RESUMES. I've notified them both via hobby channels, and they have no idea of my professional identity, but everybody they had in their contact list may now know theirs.

If you were careless enough to mix hobby and civilian contacts, you stand a great chance of this happening to you. Be careful damn it!

Wow! That's a huge disaster waiting to happen...

It's call a Trojan.

Technology and bugs go hand in hand.

If only you knew what kind of code one can execute ON A REMOTE COMPUTER by taking advantage of a buffer overflow condition in Flash, linked into IE 8 ...

Gotta love Microshaft.

It's not a Trojan, it's an option that people choose because they are lazy. Hell, my attorney did it and as I've recommended providers to him I received one in my hobby e-mail. I'm quite certain several providers would have received the same.

Hence, ALWAYS have a separate e-mail. This is not Facebook/LinkedIn appropriate activity and since both mine e-mail accounts, keep a separate one.

It's not a Trojan, it's an option that people choose because they are lazy. Hell, my attorney did it and as I've recommended providers to him I received one in my hobby e-mail. I'm quite certain several providers would have received the same.

Hence, ALWAYS have a separate e-mail. This is not Facebook/LinkedIn appropriate activity and since both mine e-mail accounts, keep a separate one. Originally Posted by AustinBusinessTraveler

And for the Love of God, keep and only use a cash paid hobby phone.

Yep I have gotten some from the guys as well. I just delete the email.

Yep I have gotten some from the guys as well. I just delete the email. Originally Posted by Sexy Roxanne

I was really more concerned with the girls' security and safety. Although it happens, it is much more rare that a provider stalks a client. But a provider exposing her entire civilian identity to past email contacts could be disasterous. It would include contacts you've kept but marked as DNS.

I agree with you 100% I was just wanting to make the guys aware of it too. There have been known to be a crazy provider here and there.

I've had a few providers spam their entire contact list with CC instead of BCC.

It was amusing - both in how large the list was and how many of you use your work email, full names in email...

Hint: go here http://www.pipl.com/

Put in your "hobby" handle and email

See if anything comes up cross-referenced.

And it's not just the clueless that this can hit. I gave a provider a bit too much info recently when signing up for a googlegroup they run, because Google helpfully crossreferenced it with another account that had my full name, place of business... fun stuff.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc... all of these services will give out as much info as they can, whether you set them to or not. Be careful out there.