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The original version of the LinkedIn mobile app uploaded your personal contacts stored on your smart phone and SIM to their server (to also "invite" them), without requesting user permission.

After that, I never installed it again (but too late), and I bought a second (non-smart) phone.

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When I created an account on LinkedIn, a long time ago, I used the web. When it asked if I wanted to invite other people from my list of contacts, I clicked yes. I thought it would let me manually enter some contacts, or at worst, give me a list to choose from, with some kind of permissions prompt. Somehow, it accessed my entire Gmail contact list, and invited them all. My goodness, that was terrifying (I didn't even know it was possible) and embarrassing. Companies are not to be trusted, ever. Especially now, as they've proven for decades they have zero moral compass, and no qualms about abusing people for profit.

WhatsApp infamously did just that.

It vacuumed the contacts and spammed them with "Join me on WhatsApp". One of the reasons for their initial exponential growth.

Almost everything coming out of Silicon Valley has an unethical past(present?) if you look at it a bit more closely.

Venmo did this too

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