Monday 31 March 2014

This Browser Tool Lets You See Anyone's Email Address Via LinkedIn

A marketing company is hijacking LinkedIn to promote its data services. And it’s scarily easy.

If you use LinkedIn, your email address can easily be exposed to anyone with access to a web browser, thanks to a Chrome extension called Sell Hack.

The tool, first noticed by Yahoo Tech , is easy to install after a quick visit to Sell Hack's site. Once installed, a small "Hack In" button will appear on any LinkedIn profile. Users will then be able to dig up an email address associated with the user's account even if they're not "connected" via LinkedIn. A recent Sell Hack blog post notes that the site was created for marketing professionals "as an internal email finder tool for us to use when prospecting."

It's important to note that Sell Hack isn't mining LinkedIn's private data; rather it takes publicly available data (like name and work information) and then references that other publicly available data across the web to find an email address. In short, Sell Hack using is LinkedIn's brand and visibility to sell its data service.

Here's how Sell Hack describes the process :

The data we process is all publicly available. We just do the heavy lifting and complicated computing to save you time. We aren't doing anything malicious to the LinkedIn website. We think browser extensions are the best way to personalize an individuals web experience. We love LinkedIn and are trying to make it better for the community.