Day: October 4, 2019

Not that I had that many questions about their reasoning. 

I just spent about an hour and a half cleaning up the “Subscriptions” in my Outlook.com account.

Most of these subscriptions appear to have been generated by my reading an email from one of the many offshore headhunters. I refuse to call them placement agents because they’re not actually helpful at all, and they’re not contracted placement agents for any of the companies they’re supposedly contacting me about.

What I found interesting is that each of these subscriptions was associated with a personal email address and I don’t recall doing anything but reading the email. So obviously there is some backend process running on the outlook server side of things. 

None of these subscriptions appeared in my local email clients. My computer is secure but the surprising thing is that Microsoft allows this on their servers. Oh and by the way you have to delete them all individually.

Fun NOT!

This all started because of LinkedIn. I got curious about where they were getting some of the “Suggested” contacts. How do they know who I know, if those people aren’t actually on LinkedIn? 

To answer that question I started digging. As I looked at the suggested contacts I noticed that there were many from a very old contact list. For example, there were people that I haven’t interacted with for many years. Yet there were also more current people. I realized that the list was being refreshed, but from where? 

Then as I dug around I found out that the list was being populated from my Outlook.com account. This is an email account that I use but I don’t store a current contact list there. That was when I found out that LinkedIn may not have a way to disconnect or shield your contact list from them. Once you’ve shared it, you can’t say stop. LinkedIn periodically refreshes the list presenting you with “New” potential contacts to connect with.

The problem is, what if you’re trying to protect the privacy of the people that you know. After all, if you’re interested in privacy, shouldn’t you also be concerned about the privacy of the people in your contact list?

Then I logged into Outlook.com and found the source list, I also discovered that deleting all your contacts on Outlook.com isn’t as easy as it might appear. While I could select all the contacts with one checkbox, I couldn’t select delete. de-selecting all the contacts and selecting one, or a few, would allow me to click delete. I found that I could select about 35-30 entries and delete them in bulk.

Then you have to go to the “Deleted Contacts” folder and do the deletion all over again.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the LinkedIn site to refresh and see if the contacts will be removed.

While checking around the Outlook site to find out if there was any way for me to simply disconnect LinkedIn, I stumbled upon the long list of “Subscriptions” that I don’t recall ever saying I’d like to sign up for.

By the way, LinkedIn doesn’t show up as an authorized application in Outlook’s site. So you can’t sever the connection simply from this side either.

I suppose it’s an oversight on the part of the LinkedIn folks, perhaps the Outlook folks, perhaps both

It does seem strange that there isn’t anyway to wipe or stop the personal contact list sharing.

I suppose sometime long ago when I created the LinkedIn account I must have misread the terms of sharing my contacts. I don’t think I understood that this was a permanent feature. I think, I believed it was a one time use.

I suppose this should serve as a cautionary tale.

If you’re interested in privacy, yours, or others make sure that you can revoke access to anything you’ve shared.

I think I begin to understand why the Europeans are such sticklers about maintaining control over their data.

We should be as vigilant here, but our lawmakers don’t have a clue about technology. It’s beyond them and will continue to be beyond them until they admit they don’t know technology. Hopefully at that point they’ll wise up and actually hire or appoint people with the knowledge and right skills to actually come up with a coherent policy on matters of privacy, data-sharing, and technology in general. 

That won’t be a perfect solution, but it might be a step in the right direction.