Zoom was secretly mining LinkedIn data
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https://mashable.com/article/zoom-linkedin-data-collection/
According to a report from the New York Times, when a user would enter a video conference, Zoom would take that person’s name and email address and run it through an internal system. This system would then match the name and email of the Zoom user with their LinkedIn profile information.
So, why was this such a problem? Zoom would take the LinkedIn profile data and connect it to the user’s Zoom account, allowing other people in the meeting to view the user’s real name, employer, job title, and location. Zoom did this without notifying the user or asking their permission. The video conferencing platform was able to match a user’s real LinkedIn profile with their Zoom name, even if they weren’t using their real name on the platform.
To see this data, Zoom users just needed to have subscribed to a sales prospecting service called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. However, Zoom’s systems did not require users in the meeting to subscribe to LinkedIn’s service for the video conferencing platform to access it.
The ability to see users’ LinkedIn data has been removed from Zoom as of Thursday.
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Don’t know about other people, but I usually avoid linking my accounts on various systems together.
Avoid using my account from one system as login to another system.
Almost always say “no” whenever one site asks if I want to cross link to my account on another site.
Almost never type my password for one site through another site.
(The “almost” qualifier because there actually are valid reasons, totally legitimate use cases to do otherwise.)
