LinkedIn Customers Allege Company Hacked E-Mail Addresses

LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD), owner of the world’s most popular professional-networking website, was sued by customers who claim the company appropriated their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts’ addresses.

The customers, who aim to lead a group suit against LinkedIn, asked a federal judge in San Jose, California, to bar the company from repeating the alleged violations and to force it to return any revenue stemming from its use of their identities to promote the site to non-members, according to a court filing.

“LinkedIn’s own website contains hundreds of complaints regarding this practice,” they said in the complaint filed Sept. 17, which also seeks unspecified damages.

LinkedIn claims to have the largest online professional network with more than 238 million members, including executives from every Fortune 500 company. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Weiner is quoted in the complaint as saying on a second quarter earnings call, “This strong membership growth is due in large part to new growth optimization efforts.”

LinkedIn fell 2.1 percent yesterday in New York Stock Exchange trading to close at $243.90.

Doug Madey, a spokesman for Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, said the lawsuit is without merit and the company will fight it.

“LinkedIn is committed to putting our members first, which includes being transparent about how we protect and utilize our members’ data,” he said yesterday in an e-mail.

LinkedIn required the members to provide an external e-mail address as their username on its site, then used the information to access their external e-mail accounts when they were left open, according to the complaint.

“LinkedIn pretends to be that user and downloads the e-mail addresses contained anywhere in that account to LinkedIn’s servers,” they said. “LinkedIn is able to download these addresses without requesting the password for the external e-mail accounts or obtaining users’ consent.”

LinkedIn software engineer Brian Guan described his role on the company’s website as “devising hack schemes to make lots of $$$ with Java, Groovy and cunning at Team Money!” according to the complaint. Java is a programming language and computing platform released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. Groovy is a another language for the Java platform.

The plaintiffs, who are seeking a jury trial, provided a link to the engineer’s post, http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianguan, which they said they last visited Sept. 13.

The customers blamed the use of their contacts on LinkedIn’s strategy, which they quoted from a regulatory filing, to “pursue initiatives that promote the viral growth of our member base,” according to the complaint.

In an e-mail to Bloomberg yesterday, Deborah Lagutaris, whose LinkedIn profile describes her as a tax preparer, real estate broker and former law clerk, said LinkedIn contacted more than 3,000 people in her name, including those copied in on her e-mail messages.

“This means that not only direct e-mail contacts but peripherals as well,” were used, she said. “I contacted LinkedIn and they said, ‘Oh, you can remove all those invitations from your account manually. We don’t know what happened.’”