Got a notification from LinkedIn saying "You're one of the few experts who have been invited to collaborate on ..." I got curious and opened up the link.
Apparently, now instead of professional writers being paid to pen down their, usually, cohesive & authentic views, LinkedIn is trying out the idea of generating content using an LLM and then asking for free editorial services from users in exchange for "badges" ๐คฏ ๐คฆโโ๏ธ
This is cheap IMO. Even for LinkedIn.
What's happened to the "content team" at LinkedIn!?
Not surprising. LinkedIn have always been scummy, going back to when they first started and they'd convince people to give them their email accounts and passwords so they could send emails to all their contacts to get them to join. They're also one of only 2 companies that at one point sold my unique email address to spam immediately after joining.
May I ask which was the other company?
Adult Friend Finder lol. Like, I kind of expected it with that company, but not so much LinkedIn.
The jury's out on exactly what happened. Maybe it was cyber crime, and someone had managed to infect a handful of websites, or maybe it was some underhanded commercial venture that certain places signed up to. I just know that my email address was only ever used on that website - the address didn't even technically exist either, I own a domain and make up emails on the fly, which filter through to my actual accounts. I've been doing this for years, and actually very few places compromised my email - which is why LinkedIn and AFF stand out so much.
Incidentally, I later created a new account with LinkedIn with a new email and didn't have this issue. However, I do still get occassional spam - and spam that is related to my career - so apparently there is still some way people can get LinkedIn email addresses.
I get spam to my work account saying that they got my information from LinkedIn. The e-mail I use on linkedin is a spam collection account that I never use for anything real. I check it every couple of months and delete the entire inbox.
The only place they could get my contact information is one of my suppliers has a shitty webpage design with my info listed. Easy for a bot to scrape and sell.
My current theory is that the professional "sales list" data collection companies are running scraped data against Linkedin data and claiming it came from there.
I get e-mails from from companies who want to sell "sales lead" lists to me as well as a few poorly targeted fools who bought the "sales lead" list from them.