LinkedIn set to shutdown security-plagued Intro service for iPhone

LinkedIn, a popular social site for the business crowd, carries a lot of benefits for customers. There is the opportunity for networking, along with finding work. To that end, like any social network, the company has strived to find ways to enhance its offerings and make things more appealing.

It has not always succeeded, and one such failure is about to be killed off. Intro was an app for iPhone that insinuated itself into the user's email, and was perhaps a bad idea from the start.

Security researcher Graham Cluely points out "this 'feature' came at a huge cost for privacy. Because to get it to work, LinkedIn required you to change the settings of your iPhone so that rather than it connecting to your email provider's servers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) it would connect via LinkedIn's proxy server instead".

Cluely went further in his effort to get the point across, stating "maybe you were happy with the idea of sharing all of your communications with the company which lost the passwords of over six million users and scooped up the contents of users' iOS calendars, including sensitive information such as confidential meeting notes and call-in numbers -- which they then transmitted in plain text, not encrypted". Yes, I doubt many people were happy doing that.

Now LinkedIn's Deep Nishar announces "we are shutting down LinkedIn Intro as of March 7, 2014. Intro was launched last year to bring the power of LinkedIn to your email inbox on your iPhone. While Intro is going away, we will continue to work on bringing the power of LinkedIn to wherever our members work".

To go along with this announcement, the company also mentions that it is killing iPad support for its app on versions 6.0 and older and also getting rid of Slidecast, a presentation app it had maintained. LinkedIn hopes that a more narrow focus will help with better development of core products.

Photo Credit: andrea michele piacquadio/Shutterstock

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