kamaranti: Comfibook - LinkedIn: warning!

Mid January I noticed that my personal LinkedIn profile was published on Comfibook. This is surprising, because my profile information at LinkedIn has been set as a non-public profile for over a year. Research shows that this is happening to other people as well, and some had noticed that updates to their LinkedIn profiles were not reflected on Comfibook.

I did this test myself and found that although the written information from my LinkedIn profile was not updated, the removal of my picture was - EVEN though my LinkedIn profile was still set to private, that is, not publicly visible.

I submitted a request to Comfibook to remove my profile. However, they must be a scam operation from God knows where, they never replied.

Below an example of a Comfibook 'profile' (apologies, Eric Seger. Please let me know if you want me to remove this example image):

I am now in discussion with LinkedIn, and in fact am holding them responsible for not protecting my LinkedIn profile information. They need to contact Comfibook about stealing and publishing their protected user's information.

We'll see how soon LinkedIn will act. At this moment we're in a second round of transferring 'my issue' to the technical department. I submitted the html code of the comfibook page to LinkedIn for analysis. The first time around, LinkedIn ended up telling me I can set my profile information to private, ignoring the fact that it has already been set to private for over a year.

Methods like Comfibook uses should be made illegal. Is everyone aware that privacy protection on the internet is poor for US users, compared to Europe? What is the reason for that?

"Although partial regulations exist, there is no all-encompassing law regulating the acquisition, storage, or use of personal data in the U.S. In general terms, in the U.S., whoever can be troubled to key in the data, is deemed to own the right to store and use it, even if the data were collected without permission."

"Other citizens, and private companies most importantly, engage in far more threatening activities, especially since the automated processing of data became widespread. The Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data was concluded within the Council of Europe in 1981. This convention obliges the signatories to enact legislation concerning the automatic processing of personal data, which many duly did."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy

Within the current legal provisions, LinkedIn is responsible for letting others simply electronically harvest profile information and publish it on another site, because it claims to protect that information.

Here is their recent customer service reply:
"Your privacy and security is our top concern. We want to maintain your trust, so we adhere to the following principles to protect your privacy: 1. We will never rent or sell your personally identifiable information to third parties for marketing purposes 2. We will never share your contact information with another user, without your consent. 3. Any sensitive information that you provide will be secured with all industry standard protocols and technology."

LinkedIn continues to explain how I can turn my public profile on and off, again ignoring the information that it had already been turned off for a year. It states it is 'not responsible for contents published on other sites'. That is a standard phrase, but how does it apply to 'entrusted information' that has been pulled from their site? And how is LinkedIn going to deal with the fact that the 'Results from LinkedIn' profile is not current?

I expect and hope for an increasing number of users who are going to complain about this, not just to LinkedIn, but also to Comfibook.