10 Reasons To Fear LinkedIn’s New Service

The business social media network wants to rout your email. The benefits to you are unclear

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re [the] customer, you’re not – you’re the product.

- BRUCE SCHNEIER

LinkedIn released a new product today called Intro.  They call it “doing the impossible”, but some might call it “hijacking email”.  Why do we say this?  Consider the following:

Intro reconfigures your iOS device (e.g. iPhone, iPad) so that all of your emails go through LinkedIn’s servers. You read that right. Once you install the Intro app, all of your emails, both sent and received, are transmitted via LinkedIn’s servers. LinkedIn is forcing all your IMAP and SMTP data through their own servers and then analyzing and scraping your emails for data pertaining to…whatever they feel like.

“But that sounds like a man-in-the-middle attack!” I hear you cry. Yes. Yes it does. Because it is. That’s exactly what it is. And this is a bad thing. If your employees are checking their company email, it’s an especially bad thing.

Why is this so bad?  Here’s a list of 10 reasons to start...