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Comment by markokocic | Hacker News Reader

Reading only the title I would answer: "Of course not", but there are more questions to this.

Why the original owner allowed company to use his own account? By the fact that he handed down password and permissions to the company to operate this account, one could argue that this is not his own account anymore.

However, whoever wins this suit, the right thing to do for LinkedIn would be to just disable/delete the account for misuse. The fact that multiple people inside a company had been sharing the same account, changing person name, picture and position is a bit fishy, and potentially a scam against other linkedin users. I wouldn't be happy to connect to "John D" and write recommendation to him, only to find out that few weeks later this is some "Alex F" I don't know.

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By the fact that he handed down password and permissions to the company to operate this account, one could argue that this is not his own account anymore.

I've given colleagues the keys to my appartment, the password to my privately-owned laptop, ipad and phone...

Sometimes these weren't work-related and just happened to involve colleagues, other times they were 100% work related.

I don't believe that giving a colleague access to something of yours indicates it is owned by the company. Hell, why not argue the other way, the company gave me access to all their servers so don't they sort of belong to me now?

Yes, but did you give them the keys so that they could hold a meeting with investors in your living room? It seems that she meant for others in the company to use the account as a means of interacting with clients, etc.

I think the lawsuit is ridiculous, but I'd enjoy taking the plaintiff's side in a mock trial.

No I didn't, but if I had done that would it make a difference? It's certainly something I would do if the situation came up (and if I didn't live just down the road from our offices).

Certainly I've given access to my blackberry to answer calls from clients before, I still claim I fully own this phone.

> No I didn't, but if I had done that would it make a difference?

I think it makes a difference. As an admittedly weak analogy (only one cup of tea so far this morning), I can write off a dinner as a business expense if I dine with a client, but I can't if I'm just taking my family out and talking about business.

I can expense a meal I buy for a colleague and myself too, not just if a third party client is involved.

So imagine our offices are busy as hell and there isn't room for one of my colleagues to meet with a client who is coming in. I say "take my keys, there's scotch in the usual place, take him into the living room". Maybe I'd even expense the bottle of scotch afterwards. Would you now argue that the company owns my home because it was used in this way?

Depends.

If you were the CEO, and your small house faced a busy street, and had the business name plastered all over it, and you made a habit of inviting customers, coworkers, clients, business partners, etc. - perhaps! (Again, in a mock trial sort of situation, not in one where I'd actually potentially make you homeless.)

But also IANAL, so I'm sure there must be a precedent for this sort of thing, both online and real-state wise.

You're way off. Possession, contrary to popular cliché, is not 9/10ths of the law. Property, real or personal, has an owner. In the case of real estate and certain other property (such as a car), that ownership is usually even on record with the county or state.

Short of actual abandonment, which is a narrow, and generally hard-to-prove case, ownership of property in any form cannot be transferred without some sort of contract. Although some property might be transferred by oral contract, that still requires evidence that a contract was formed, which requires a "meeting of the minds". You actually have to prove there was an intent by the owner to transfer the property.

That's a high bar to clear, especially with something as inherently personal as a linkedin account, where any reasonable person would assume the account belongs to the individual, not the corporation.

I would disagree on the ownership question. Just because someone allows access to the account doesn't mean the ownership of the account is transferred. It would be as if you gave me keys to your house for the weekend and then I claim ownership of your house.

But one of the comments in the story has the answer. If the issue at hand are the connections in the account, then why not just hand over a copy of the list of connections? Granted, the company would then have to ask everyone on that list to connect with the new account, which they may not be inclined to do.

To me, it would depend on who created the account. If the company created it for the use of the employee it belongs to the company. If the employee created it for their use, whether it was related to their job or not, it belongs to the employee.

I think where it gets muddy is multiple people working on and/or using the account on company time. If maintaining the account, updating contacts, etc was part of their regular job, this argument starts to make sense. That would be online with working on side projects on the job or with company resources.

If it was a "I'm too busy, here.. log in and grab his email" sort of thing, that seems more in line with the "you can use my phone" analogy.

Either way, I'm interested to see what their argument is and how it shakes out as this could impact quite a few other things.

The only valid reason I can think of to share your LinkedIn credentials is to manage LinkedIn ads. Though ideally that should be done from a dedicated account.

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