LinkedIn, a professional networking website and apparently the world’s foremost source of email spam, is being held accountable for its unrelenting assault on your inbox.
A few years ago, a whole bunch of people fed up with LinkedIn’s excessive emailing filed a class action lawsuit against the company’s “Add Connections” feature, which invited a user’s email contacts to ‘connect’ with them on the service. Invites were sent up to three times, and were unnecessarily difficult to unsubscribe from.
Today, LinkedIn agreed to a $17 CDN million out of court settlement, $4.25 million of which will go to the lawyers who’ve worked the case over the past few years. Oddly, those who didn’t sign up for the “Add Connections” feature but were subject to the barrage of emails anyway are not included in the settlement.
Since being a general nuisance doesn’t hold up in court, the grounds for the lawsuit were based on the fact that “endorsement emails could injure users’ reputations.”
Sure.
LinkedIn began cutting down on the amount of emails they send earlier this year, with the company’s senior director of product management saying simply, “we get it.”
It’s not much for a billion dollar company to have to pay out, but it’s one less thing your email has to take in.
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