This has always interested me. I vaguely recall hearing somewhere that Gmail sells contact info to LinkedIn? Can anyone confirm or invalidate this?
I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.
I've had countless cases similar to the Craigslist one that seem uncanny.
Gmail has/had that behavior where anyone you email ends up getting created as a contact, and in the early days it seemed a lot more aggressive as to when it would auto-add someone to the list. So there are a lot of people who have spurious entries in their contact lists.
I know it wasn't worth the time to me to clean the list, up until I bought an Android phone in 2010. So I had six years worth of auto-added contacts, going back to when I first got a gmail invite.