It’s gone as quickly as it arrived!
LinkedIn, in its recent announcement revealed that it is retiring its ‘Intro’ email app for iOS. The ‘Intro’ mail app will be shut down on March 7, 2014 just after four months of its launch.
This app was launched in late October 2012 with an aim to link LinkedIn contact details with Apple’s Mail app that would display LinkedIn user’s profile details in the email. The Intro app installed in an Apple user’s phone displayed the sender’s photo and brief professional bio of the senders including name, position and company within the body of the email message. This information can only be shown if the sender is a LinkedIn member. The receiver of the email could get further details from the sender’s LinkedIn profile through a drop down menu available in the mail.
Apparently, LinkedIn had launched this app to save the time that the user spent in viewing the LinkedIn profiles of the email sender. For this, LinkedIn had to scan every email that came in the user’s inbox. This meant that LinkedIn actually read all the mails sent to the user.
This app was criticized by the users as LinkedIn was handling their data. Users were also skeptical that this app could change their profiles, and wipe their settings or change them. Security experts’ also contended that this app could potentially expose the users to hackers.
The security consulting firm Bishop Fox said that the service essentially amounted to a “man-in-the-middle attack,” and that someone can use it to launch a phishing attack. Bishop Fox calls this service ‘a dream for attackers,’ while researcher at Mandiant, Richard Bejtlich, said that the service just completely breaks the idea that email traffic is going where it should go and no place else.
LinkedIn disagrees to all the concerns regarding security issue about its ‘Intro’ software, the company also said that the move to shut down the feature will allow it to focus on “long-term investments on a few big bets.” Deep Nishar – the company’s SVP of products and user experience – said in a blog post: “Users of Intro will be able to uninstall it before March 7 and switch back to their previous mail accounts.” He also says, “While Intro is going away, we will continue to work on bringing the power of LinkedIn to wherever our members work.” The users of ‘Intro’ will be provided with comprehensive instructions on how they can remove the feature from their Apple handsets.
Users of this app will have to disable ‘Intro’ otherwise their email accounts won’t work normally after the shutdown date, the report added.
