LinkedIn explains how its mobile app collects data from your calendar

If there weren’t enough landmines for publicly-traded social networks to step into.

LinkedIn today is responding to a report by The Next Web that claims the company’s mobile app collects data from users’ calendars.

Says The Next Web: “The information is gathered without explicit permission by a feature that allows users to access their calendar within the app.”

Quickly trying to diffuse the situation, LinkedIn’s Joff Redfern walked through the app’s “dos and don’ts” on the company’s official blog. He also talked about improvements that will be made in updates of its Android and iOS apps to address the issue.

We Do:

  • We ask your permission before accessing your calendar, this will continue to be an opt-in feature
  • We provide you with a way to turn off the calendar feature at any time in the settings
  • We send calendar data to our server only when the LinkedIn app is launched to be matched with relevant LinkedIn profiles of meeting attendees
  • We send your calendar data to our servers over a secure SSL connection

We Don’t:

  • We do not store any calendar information on our servers
  • We do not share or use your calendar data for purposes other than matching it with relevant LinkedIn profiles
  • We do not under any circumstances access your calendar data unless you have explicitly opted in to sync your calendar

We Will Improve:

  • We will no longer send data from the meeting notes section of your calendar event
  • There will be a new “learn more” link to provide more information about how your calendar data is being used

Stay tuned.

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