LinkedIn, the social network for the working world with close to 600 million users is being accused of violating data protection rules concerning around 18 million email addresses.
These details were disclosed in a report published Friday by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner. This report covered activities in the first six months of this calendar year. In a list of investigations that have been reported concerning Facebook, WhatsApp and the Yahoo data breach, the DPC revealed one investigation that had not been reported before.
The DPC found that LinkedIn in the US had obtained emails for 18 million people who were not already members of the social network, and then used these in a hashed form for targeted advertisements on the Facebook platform.
“The complaint was ultimately amicably resolved,” the DPC said, “with LinkedIn implementing a number of immediate actions to cease the processing of user data for the purposes that gave rise to the complaint.”
Also, it has been reported that LinkedIn was also applying its social graph-building algorithms to build networks — to suggest professional networks for users or undertaking pre-computation.