Linkedin, known for using email reminders to use its professional services, will now have to pay a large amount of compensation because it "went too far.".
In an email sent by LinkedIn, users were notified that they had been selected for a settlement following a class action lawsuit related to email marketing. The company has agreed to pay $13 million to users who may have been affected by its Add Connections service. The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed in California in 2013.
LinkedIn's Add Connections program allowed users to import personal contacts into the system and then send invitations to connect on LinkedIn. However, if the email recipient did not accept the invitation within a certain period of time, LinkedIn would send two emails, repeating the invitation.
If you're a LinkedIn fan, this is called a follow-up. But others, less familiar with the service, might consider such messages annoying or spammy. What makes matters worse is if the recipient believes the unsolicited messages are coming from you, a person they know, and not from a third party.
The problem here is LinkedIn's persistence, without the user's consent.
Within the text of the reminder emails, there is a unique identification number, which concerns the Add Connections service, and based on this, users can request their share of the compensation.
Although LinkedIn is moving forward with the massive payment to address legal cases regarding email service abuse, the company has not directly admitted that it did anything wrong, and it probably won't.
