The value for LinkedIn to vacuum up my email is immense! They'll know everyone I email and the content of the emails as well. They'll know where I shop and what I purchase. If I send a private email to a friend who has this installed, I've now unknowingly bcc'ed LinkedIn. Not only that, but they know this for the entire history of my email account! The person I stopped emailing 7 years ago... LinkedIn has access to that as well.
But in this case I don't think the value prop for the user is big enough to make me overcome this large of an ask.
I appreciate LinkedIn addressing this in their Privacy Pledge, but so long as they retain the right to change it at any time, I'm too uncomfortable to install this. But, I'm still in awe of the creative work-around. :)
Thanks for this comment, nostromo. You've managed to address privacy problems with the Linkedin Intro while praising the technical solution. This is a great example of constructive criticism that I, for one, would like to see more on HN. Constant raging decreases the efficiency of knowledge transfer and community building.
Maybe one such comment / thread would be enough to significantly increase quality of a discussion.
My sarcasm processing engine had a coredump. I have no idea who is sincere anymore in this thread. Please turn on sarcasm tags so I should know whether to agree/disagree, be pissed, etc.
We need to have user-generated labels attached to comments: sarcastic, flamebait, domain expert, etc. And then go even more meta and have algorithmically and/or privileged users affirm the label. Lets throw in some labels for common cognitive biases, statistical errors, logical fallacies and eagerly slap them on all popular offending comments. And then go all in on multivariate testing of mutations of algorithms optimizing for best (your definition may very) discourse.
If such thing would happen and became popular, someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet crowd would be puking rainbows all day long.
I guess it is a question of time this becoming feasible.
Maybe we should be discussing Apple's closed-ass OS instead of harping on the only workaround that could possibly exist. Such "creative" measures wouldn't need to be taken if it was simple for a user to augment their email app.
> if it was simple for a user to augment their email app
You don't really think it's ever "simple" for a user to augment their email app?
Plugins are hard to implement on both ends, and they complicate otherwise simple apps. Open source is also hard, because every codebase is different in many and often unpredictable ways from others. Not even an experienced programmer would always be able to crack open the source to a mobile email client and make this sort of modification.
You can't really expect a mobile email client to allow third parties to add their own extensions to it.
If they were that fussed they could have tried to make a clone of a email client and integrate their own features. If it was better than the default client, people would use it (I use Sparrow on my iPhone for email, not touched the default Mail app for years)
You know how hard it is to get people to migrate from something as ingrained as an email app? Even a great client will suffer from the migration pain.
And to respond to criticisms of "plugin dev difficulty," that's bs. Browser clients have a world more complication when it comes to supporting a plugin environment, and they make it work just fine.
The value for LinkedIn to vacuum up my email is immense! They'll know everyone I email and the content of the emails as well. They'll know where I shop and what I purchase. If I send a private email to a friend who has this installed, I've now unknowingly bcc'ed LinkedIn. Not only that, but they know this for the entire history of my email account! The person I stopped emailing 7 years ago... LinkedIn has access to that as well.
But in this case I don't think the value prop for the user is big enough to make me overcome this large of an ask.
I appreciate LinkedIn addressing this in their Privacy Pledge, but so long as they retain the right to change it at any time, I'm too uncomfortable to install this. But, I'm still in awe of the creative work-around. :)