A not so well thought-out feature – or defect – allows any LinkedIn user to indicate the company they work for has acquired, merged with or become a division of another company without any third-party verification whatsoever. Worse, when a user falsely claims company A has e.g. purchased company B, this will actually show up on company B’s public profile as such. Needless to say, this could cause quite some confusion.
For examples, head on over to the LinkedIn profiles of Yahoo! and Google, which are both apparently owned by a Pakistani web hosting firm with about 10 employees. Or take a look at the public LinkedIn profile of Internet commerce giant eBay, which is seemingly a subsidiary to collector community and marketplace operator Colnect, whose founder and sole employee Amir Wald tipped us about the ‘feature’.
Update: fixed now
The only thing you need to make false pretenses about the relationship of a company with another, is indicate you work there as well as obtain full access to the profile settings – I couldn’t make Google the parent company of say, Skype, even if I pretended to work there because I don’t have a valid e-mail address and/or the necessary rights.
But you can definitely make any company you have editing rights to the owner or subsidiary of any other company without as much as a hitch.
All you need to do is go to the part of the LinkedIn website where you can edit a company’s profile and click on the ‘Related Companies’ menu item. There, you can indicate your employer – true or not – is a Division, Subsidiary, Parent, Acquisition or Merger of any company that has a profile on the popular business social network.
Always dreamed of owning Apple or Microsoft? Here’s your chance to pretend you do, and it’ll take you only about 5 seconds.
We can’t be sure how long this has been possible already, but we’ve contacted the company about it, so we expect to see a quick fix to this anomaly.
Update: fixed now
In the meantime, please behave yourselves. Okay? Okay.
I am buying Facebook and Paypal. All are invited to our acquisition party.
Oh shoot, I forgot Paypal is with Ebay and Ebay is with Colnect apparently!
Why don’t you buy Colnect then?
This is so bad.
I just bought myself.
Be careful, you could go blind doing that.
You exposed this bug and just asked people not to go exploit it? Why not hand loaded water guns to an entire 4th grade class and offer to leave the room for 5 minutes? I’m sure everything will be nice and dry when you get back.
Well, it is highly entertaining. Let the lulz commence.
Sssht.
I’m off to buy News Corp. That Murdoch guy is fired, along with most of the wall street journal.
hater
Finally – TechCrunch will be fair and balanced. (i kid, i kid)
Can i buy techcrunch? lmao
I am merging Apple and Microsoft. Dammit, let watch some fireworks.
With over 200 employees at LinkedIn, since we definitely know that LinkedIn is not innovating, I am just curious to know what the hell do they actually do at work?
So, who’s going to buy LinkedIn?
hehe. not me!
lol linked in should think out new features before releasing them
Wow.
Linkedin bugs?
*SHOCKING*
Tell us how you really feel, Jay
Btw, LinkedIn has very swiftly acknowledged the bug and is already working on a fix.
Awesome. It’s good to see outsourced QA/QC in action.
Has TechCrunch submitted an invoice to Linkedin already?
Probably this is a ploy to get people to login to Linkedin.
For ex. this is the first time I have logged into LinkedIn in 4 months.
it’s fixed/removed
I just tried it and it still works. We’ll update when there’s a fix, the company will get in touch with us.
strange. i’m looking at all the above company pages and there are no incorrect parent companies listed.
and there’s not an option to edit company info (except for my current employer’s profile of course).
i’m accessing from japan, but don’t see that making a difference.
Are you Still looking for your sugar dady? Want to
find a good looking and quality man but not sure
if they are true and serious? Well, join to find more
than 1200,000 quality verified members and have
fun! Totally free go join (Sugarloves-com)
Why do spammers have to continue to live, cant you just die and go away? I mean a painful death with many small cuts and being dumped in a bathtub of acid sounds perfect. I hope your website gets shut down and you get gang rapped by bubbas in prison.
Sorry, beer makes me very pissed as spammers.
This isn’t necessarily a bug if they’re adopting the Wikipedia model- the wisdom of crowds. Theoretically, a wrong business relationship should be seen by someone else who will correct it. That’s how Wikipedia remains so accurate even though its a ‘bug’ that anyone can post inaccurate information.
They never adopted a Wikipedia-like model. You have to verify you work at a company to be able to edit its profile. You cannot edit others’ profiles or even view full profile information without the other person adding you to their network. So yes, it’s a bug.
Linkedin is down. Probably too many companies are merged sold:)
Message from linkdin
LinkedIn
Your LinkedIn Network Will Be Back Soon
We’ve notified our operations staff that you are having a problem reaching LinkedIn. We’ll get you reconnected soon.
What is interesting is that this has been for a long time now and also any employee can change company details. After he leaves the company he will still have access to changing info.
They should create a kind of authorization structure Yammer has and may be make some money out of it
How is this different from wikipedia?