Funny story about LinkedIn going viral on me

I would consider myself a relatively sophisticated internet user and also knowledgeable about APIs, social plugins and onsite usability, but what happened to me a few weeks ago came as a big surprise... My mum, who just turned 70 connected with me on LinkedIn. Say what? Unreal? What happened to her? Did she finally figure out the secrets of the web and was planning to launch a new career...? Then another weird thing happened: I received an email from LinkedIn with the subject line "Bjorn, congratulations! You have one of the top 1% most viewed LinkedIn profiles for 2012!". Something was going on... Then I remembered that I connected my new gmail with LinkedIn the other day...

The LinkedIn read something like this:

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LinkedIn is requesting permission to:

• View basic information about your account

• View your email address

• Manage your contacts

• Perform these operations when I'm not using the application

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Dear LinkedIn team, please tell me, that you have not send a contact-request to the hundreds of contacts in my corporate gmail accounts??? Now, I am pretty sure, I did not click on any "Send Invitations" button as it would be nuts with thousands of contacts...

Interestingly enough there are no settings to disable that authorisation on LinkedIn...

 In case you have granted LinkedIn access to your gmail account, you can revoke that token in your gmail account here: https://accounts.google.com/b/0/IssuedAuthSubTokens?hl=en

After several emails with the linkedIn customer service, I realised that they are not aware that the LinkedIn feature was using an instant login with an active gmail session, since they kept referring back to "we are not storing your password"... Of course not, I never entered it...

Google explains it better than me: https://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=112802

Here are some screenshots of what I think is not an ideal solution.

Linked in bugs with google signin from Björn Behrendt