Will you post your email and cell contacts to this thread now? If not, why not?
I'm confused that you're confused. There are a hundred scenarios I can think of. Gmail being good at spam detection is your defense? For one, I get text message spam all the time now. I dont want people having my number who don't need it.
> Will you post your email and cell contacts to this thread now? If not, why not?
Well that is completely different to what LinkedIn is doing.
Sending information via plain text is bad but is fairly unlikely to be read in transit. (This isn't to say that it shouldn't be changed)
LinkedIn shouldn't be collecting the data. At the same time it isn't making the data public. It is somewhat unclear what they are doing with it. It is unlikely though that is for some evil scheme.
Compare this to posting a tonne of personal information on what is essentially a public forum. Completely different.
The OP was making a very broad claim. Why would anyone want to keep their contact list secret? Who cares?
In this particular case, I agree LinkedIn in all likelihood is not going to post your contacts to a public forum. But it's completely conceivable that it could happen.
But if there are hundreds of apps and services out there storing your contacts (and there will be if you're careless), then it's a virtual certainty that they will be used in ways you didn't attend.
It almost seems more likely than not these days that a big trove of personal information will be hacked. Even if it doesn't contain your credit card numbers, personal information is still extremely valuable because it allows hackers to bypass security questions and reset passwords.
EDIT: Haha, front page, huge dump of linkedn PW hashes leaked: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4073309. I had written something about LinkedIn probably having "decent engineers", and being safer than giving your personal data to a shoddy government website. But I realize security is more a matter of process than hiring top engineers. And all these startups in a huge rush. They're only going to do security right after they're embarrassed. Being a programmer, I know how the sausage is made.
I'm confused that you're confused. There are a hundred scenarios I can think of. Gmail being good at spam detection is your defense? For one, I get text message spam all the time now. I dont want people having my number who don't need it.