LinkedIn’s new Intro service has put up a big sign advertising to cyber criminals, nation states and others ‘hack here, we’ve got loads of juicy data’. The architecture of its new service is innovative but compromises your security and privacy in ways you really should care about. Oh, and whilst I am at it, I’ll have a dig at Apple AAPL -1.12%for putting LinkedIn in this position in the first place. So how does it work?
The new service proudly announced on the LinkedIn LNKD -1.06% blog integrates with the Apple iOS native mail application to provide integrated details about the contact you are conversing with. Neat idea. What is interesting however is that LinkedIn has succeeded in integrating into the native Apple Mail application, an impressive feat of engineering given how intensely Apple restricts its applications and operating system ecosystem (more on the pros and cons of that later). In short, the application works by re-configuring your e-mail to proxy through LinkedIn servers so that as your e-mail passes through they can inject (inject sounds bad I know, but hold on and you will see how bad it is) a fancy banner at the top that looks like it has been integrated with the application natively.