LinkedIn: Attempting to Destroy My Life

I’m having a mini-meltdown rage-attack at LinkedIn. Social Media is attempting to destroy my life with their privacy violations.

So, you may not have noticed, or maybe you did, but this site is a secret from my “real world.” I haven’t talked about it in a while but the reason this site is secret is that my family is really conservative and I went all batshit insane and wrote myself a naughty, honest-as-hell little novel called Angst. In order to market this novel, I created a blog called Angst (where I feel free to be my naughty-honest-ranting little self) and then eventually Angst Anarchy came out a bit later.

Basically I’m a super secret agent living a double life. It’s pretty exciting. I am Jason Bourne. Or something.

However, I really don’t like it when LinkedIn ruins my life by straight up stealing my gmail contacts since the LinkedIn App happens to live on my phone with my gmail account.  Apparently proximity is 9/10’s of the law?  The best part is that then LinkedIn up and outs my secret to everyone I’ve ever emailed by making suggestions about us “making a connection.”

And then to add insult to injury, I recently noticed that other people are following my social media accounts that I have never emailed from my Angst Gmail account and our only contact was LinkedIn.  So…yeah…how exactly is this happening? (maybe this is Gmail’s fault?)

Basically my family is gonna be all up in my blog/book shit in no time, thank you LinkedIn!!  You just ruined my life!!!

This makes me want to give a big F-YOU assholes to LinkedIn and completely leave the site, however it is helpful for networking ON MY OWN TERMS!!! Let me reiterate that….ON -MY -OWN -TERMS!!!! The key here is ME!!

While I was getting fired up about this, I did a bit of research on the LinkedIn forums and found that lots and lots of people are absolutely bullshit over this issue with LinkedIn stealing their contacts (which I actually noticed Twitter doing recently too, making annoying suggestions about how So-and-So is also on Twitter.  REALLY? THANKS! FUCK YOU!). And no where in the huge list of complaints did LinkedIn make a comment or say sorry or even say it was a glitch. So basically they’re doing this shit on purpose and are quite proud of themselves. Here’s an article about how they were sued by people and claimed they did nothing wrong.  Really?  How did you get my contacts then?  Because my Gmail account is NOT the same email I used to set up LinkedIn.

So…if you download LinkedIn to your phone, it will steal the shit out of all the other stuff on your phone. The same thing with Twitter. And I checked, I had never given them permission to my Gmail account.

I want to say to LinkedIn: I know you might find it really surprising, but people actually have personal lives and personal email accounts.  Not everything we do, all day, every day is professional i.e. work related.  And yes, we actually do want PRIVACY when it comes to our PERSONAL LIVES.  I know this concept blows your fucking puny corporation mind and I’m sorry to drop a truth bomb on you, but WTF, please give me my personal life back.

I’m sure somewhere in the fine print I agreed to this soul stealing bullshit, but I didn’t realize it and if I had I would have flipped LinkedIn the bird.

For those of you I’ve actually talked to through email who have seen my LinkedIn, I’m not worried about you, we cool, we cool. Still, it does suck that LinkedIn doesn’t give a shit and just steals whatever it wants from your phone.  It makes me want to destroy LinkedIn, trash my phone and run screaming from the internet.

UPDATE: One of my friends just deleted all her social media accounts.  That actually sounds pretty sweet right about now. Just bomb the hell out of your online life?  Live OFF THE GRID.  Hell yes.