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In this whole social media bubble implosion scenario, LinkedIn often gets portrayed as the angelic social media company that actually makes money and has a useful purpose compared to that wanton do-no-good social network Facebook -- until today. The social network for professionals got itself involved in a double whammy of a scandal. After Skycure Securities discovered LinkedIn's app has some privacy issues, copying full meeting notes and details from a smartphone's calendar and then sending that back to the company's servers, over 6 million of LinkedIn's passwords got hacked. Today, LinkedIn is not having a good day. But, in the long term, LinkedIn will come out just fine, still looking better than Facebook.
First off, on the scale of scandals, these are pretty minor. The password leak has the Internet mostly laughing, rather than outraged. What harm could a hacker even do with a LinkedIn password, we asked this morning. Plus, there's an easy fix: Change your password. That other breach puts LinkedIn in a bit of a stickier situation. But, lucky for LinkedIn, it's like the billionth app to take user information. We're almost numb to that, at this point, possibly because we give up our information and privacy all over the place, all the time, as this Technology Review article argues. And, in both cases, LinkedIn has done the grown-up company thing, responding right away saying the company is on both situations. It's "looking into" the password hack and has updated the app so that it no longer stores or saves any user information.