The company known for using reminder emails to get you to use its professional networking service will now have to pay a hefty sum for taking the tactic a bit too far.
In an email sent by LinkedIn on Friday, users were notified that they were eligible for a class action settlement related to email marketing. The company has agreed to pay out $13 million to users who may have been impacted by its Add Connections service. The settlement stems from a 2013 class action lawsuit filed in California.
LinkedIn's Add Connections program allowed users to import their personal contacts into the company's system and then have invitations to connect on LinkedIn sent out on their behalf. However, if a recipient of the invitation email didn't accept the invitation within a certain amount of time, LinkedIn would then send two follow up emails repeating the invitation.
If you're a big fan of LinkedIn, that's called thorough follow-up. But others, less familiar with the service, might consider such messages to be annoying spam. What makes such an instance worse is if the recipient thinks the spammy messages are coming from you, a person they know, rather than a third party.
The key here is in LinkedIn's email persistence without the user's consent. On the settlement website, Gilardi & Co., the legal firm handling the payout, states:
The Court found that members consented to importing their contacts and sending the connection invitation, but did not find that members consented to LinkedIn sending the two reminder emails.
Within the settlement notification emails are individual claim ID numbers, which can then be used to file a claim for your chunk of $13 million. Of course, no one is expecting any of the claimants to win big money, but if the final tally of any of the claimants results in an individual payout of less than $10, LinkedIn has agreed to add an additional $750,000 to the overall payout fund.
LinkedIn's payout is designed to cover a broad range of email activity, from September 17, 2011 and October 31, 2014. But for LinkedIn users, there's a catch. On the claim form you must swear (under penalty of perjury) that you were indeed a user of Add Connections during the aforementioned time span. So if you're just annoyed by LinkedIn emails, but aren’t sure if you used Add Connections yourself, you may want to check before you submit your claim for a slice of the payout.
Although LinkedIn is making the massive payment to address legal claims around email abuse, the company itself hasn't directly admitted to any wrongdoing.
When contacted by Mashable, a LinkedIn spokesperson stated that because the court, "suggested that we could be more clear about the fact that we send reminder emails about pending invitations from LinkedIn members, we have made changes to our product and Privacy Policy. Ultimately, we decided to resolve this case so that we can put our focus where it matters most: finding additional ways to improve our members’ experiences on LinkedIn."
The deadline for filing a claim is December 14.
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