If you know me, you know that I’m not a big fan of recruiters. Particularly, recruiters who take the shotgun approach to finding candidates by sending the same copied-and-pasted email to hundreds of potential applicants. I know that these are copied-and-pasted, because my various email accounts will get the exact same email sent minutes apart.
I was getting some more recruiter spam today, so I asked the recruiter where he had gotten my information from (since I had deleted my LinkedIn account a week earlier). He send me a screenshot of this page on Dice:
Dice used to be a huge name in the hiring market. And I suppose it still is (look at all those tabs!) but it has since fallen in popularity thanks to LinkedIn. Anyway, turns out Dice scrapes popular social media networks, runs some heuristics on them, and figures out which profiles on various sites belong together (many of the links between sites could have been determined based on what I had entered into the sites, but not all). Most of the information above came from my LinkedIn profile, and was cached (e.g. scraped and stored in their database) since the LinkedIn profile no longer exists.
I’m fine with people being able to find my information on various sites, but not really a big fan of Dice tying all this stuff together (also, not sure whose MySpace profile my account is linked to on Dice…). I figured the next thing to do would be to ask Dice to delete this page about me. I sure didn’t ask Dice to aggregate this data on my behalf.
It’s almost creepy if you think about it, sites cyber-stalking you and aggregating it in once place. What if this site had information about forum posts and buying habits and dating site profiles of mine?
I haven’t heard back from Dice yet, but we’ll see.
Source: http://thomashunter.name/blog/dice-scraping-linkedin-for-post-mortem-recruiter-spam/
I was getting some more recruiter spam today, so I asked the recruiter where he had gotten my information from (since I had deleted my LinkedIn account a week earlier). He send me a screenshot of this page on Dice:
Dice used to be a huge name in the hiring market. And I suppose it still is (look at all those tabs!) but it has since fallen in popularity thanks to LinkedIn. Anyway, turns out Dice scrapes popular social media networks, runs some heuristics on them, and figures out which profiles on various sites belong together (many of the links between sites could have been determined based on what I had entered into the sites, but not all). Most of the information above came from my LinkedIn profile, and was cached (e.g. scraped and stored in their database) since the LinkedIn profile no longer exists.
I’m fine with people being able to find my information on various sites, but not really a big fan of Dice tying all this stuff together (also, not sure whose MySpace profile my account is linked to on Dice…). I figured the next thing to do would be to ask Dice to delete this page about me. I sure didn’t ask Dice to aggregate this data on my behalf.
It’s almost creepy if you think about it, sites cyber-stalking you and aggregating it in once place. What if this site had information about forum posts and buying habits and dating site profiles of mine?
I haven’t heard back from Dice yet, but we’ll see.
Source: http://thomashunter.name/blog/dice-scraping-linkedin-for-post-mortem-recruiter-spam/
No comments:
Post a Comment