Is it time to leave LinkedIn?

[gerisullivan]

LinkedIn had updated its privacy policy and user agreement. It's been quite some time since I've read either document, so it's entirely possible the following troublesome language has been in their user agreement long before now:

] Additionally, you grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide,
] perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and
] royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve,
] distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and
] commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any
] information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including,
] but not limited to, any user generated content, ideas, concepts,
] techniques or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without
] any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any
] third parties.

Um, er, no. I'm not in the habit of posting original work to LinkedIn the same way I do on LJ and the way I would on Facebook if I were there, the notion that I'm granting them the right to do whatever they want to with information I provide, including ways that haven't even been discovered yet, well, no. This is the exact attitude that's kept me off Facebook. (And, in Facebook's case, their practice of spamming and mis-stating things in ways that drive wedges between friends rather than helping connect them.)

I'll sleep on it, and talk with a few people who understand contractual language and rights better than I do. Until I decide one way or another, I won't be accepting LinkedIn invitations or otherwise using their services since doing so indicates acceptance of this contract.

Comments welcome.

Comments

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link! As Simon's column points out, Dropbox includes the restriction "...to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service." I don't see any such restriction on the LinkedIn TOS, and that's my primary problem with it.

Of course, Dropbox accidentally leaving everything open for a few hours is pretty darned scary. I expect to see more mistakes like that as more and more computing is done in the cloud.