I was contacted today, by phone, by Dan Payne from Opsware. He "found" my information via LinkedIn. This was surprising to me, since I don't know Dan and was under the impression that LinkedIn worked by restricting people 's access to you through their invitation approach. What I'm pretty sure happened here is that the combination of real name + company name + google was quite enough to dig up my email address and to call up my employer and get to my direct line.
I hate that. That's not the permission I gave him, and it irritates me that LinkedIn made it possible. So, I sent a note to LinkedIn customer support complaining about this inappropriate usage. I'll keep you posted with how that turns out, but it sure seems like it should be in their best interests to keep people from using them to mine other people's personal data. We'll see how that turns out.
