> I'd be curious to know if anyone on HN thinks that this is morally and ethically ok?

1. Yes. Absolutely. What could be morally unacceptable about this?

2. I very strongly believe in business ethics. And consumer protection, and worker protection. I don't think that this, in general, rises to the level of even being an issue with regard to consumer protection or worker protection. I don't know what about this would be unethical.

3. If you are going to say "user tracking" then I am just at a loss. This is categorically no different than any of the many dozens of user tracking services already in use. Except that, unlike many of those services who are very, very explicitly shady and fly-by-night, LinkedIn is, overall, an ethical player. When I visit NYTimes.com, my ghostery registers:

* Chartbeat * Doubleclick * Dynamic Yield * Facebook Connect * Facebook Custom Audience * Google Analytics * Moat * Netratings Site Census * New Relic * Optimizely * ScoreCard Research * WebTrends

As long as this guy has an appropriately written privacy policy, I see absolutely nothing legally wrong with this, either. Morally - I just don't even know where to begin on how facile a complaint I consider that to be.

"Growth hacking" is nothing but marketers rebranding themselves because word "hacking" is hot and cool (i.e. meaningless).

> What happened to the good old days when "growth hacking" was building a good product that people want to share with each other and then making it easy for them to share?

Business came in. The Internet became serious money, and with it came the "entrepreneurs". What you see is what happens everywhere where competition is intense enough - ethics are one of the first thing to fly out of the window. They harm the bottom line.

It's at least as ethical as what Google does, the same thing only more effort on their part.

Like all marketing it can be used for good or ill. It is something that we approached internally very carefully.

Should call this practice "auto-doxxing"

I do similar:

* Chromium = google services only

* Firefox = work, normal browsing (e.g. HN)

* Firejailed firefox = useful for sites too broken in regular Firefox

Both Chromium and FF are set to destroy cookies upon session termination and block third party cookies. I use uBlock Origin in "default deny"[0] mode which blocks all third party content by default. I never sign into accounts from google, twitter, linkedin, or any other advertiser purveyor within FF.

The firejailed firefox is for such advertising purveyors and/or for sites which are cumbersome to make work properly by selective whitelisting in uBlock origin. I use firejail, rather than incognito / private browsing, so that the browser will behave exactly as if it were freshly installed when I visit these sites. Some settings (and in the case of FF, add-ons) will impact incognito/private browsing; firejail allows me to run a browser "wide open" safely.

[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-de...

Love this, and this is similar to how I surf,

  Chrome + umatrix = Legit news and Google sites 
  Opera = Facebook, Instagram
  Firefox + FoxyProxy + Ghostery + noscript = Shady places

Something which might be useful if you want to do this: you can use Firefox with multiple profiles, by starting it with the '-P <profile-name>' option.

google chrome has a multiple user option with quick switching, i have multiple profiles with different settings / extensions suited to mode.

saves the time to login to accounts [unless thats the whole point for you].

Exactly. The moment I get a cold contact like this, I'll put your business on the "Never use them for any reason" list.

After I send them an email explaining why.

I just tried it with Chrome. It works -- the view showed up, even though Chrome refused to load the page in the frame.

You could load it as an image, as cross-origin policies are not enforced for images. Not sure if their tracker is server-side or requires loading JS.

For what it's worth, this technique used to work by loading profiles as a 1x1 pixel image. That technique may still be effective.

but the request has already been sent. Yes, the browsers will respect this header and not display the page and not run javascript, BUT what if the user tracking is done on the server in the first request? In that case, this technique might work...

To play the devil's advocate: if LinkedIn are smart they should offer this functionality (for premium users, of course). This is really useful info for businesses.

If all you need to get onto the list is a request to the profile page URL, even a simple image link in a forum signature/profile image/etc. might be enough...

And one more reason to avoid linked in! If this actually works.

Being able to contact former co-workers is invaluable. I moved out of New York in 2009 and moved back in 2012. In between the startup I had worked at basically gone out of business and everyone had new jobs. I didn't have anyone's email address or phone number or even Facebook connection, but I was connected on LinkedIn. I was able to reach out, find out what companies were hiring, get some interviews, etc. It massively helped in my move back and I'm in a far better place because of it.

All the recruiters, resumes, cover letters, and interview prep pale in comparison to just having a bunch of people that want to work with you again. Ultimately whether you use LinkedIn or Facebook or a paper rolodex of phone numbers, the key thing is that you need that collection of weak connections. These are not my 20 friends, these are the 150 people that have been in a company with me and know my reputation but probably don't know much more than that.

I find LinkedIn is a good tool for that. Sure there are some negatives, but I haven't found anything better. I don't necessarily want to be Facebook friends with all of the people I currently or previously worked with, and there is no way to keep an up to date contact list by yourself.

Yes, I got quite a big contract out of it when an old customer from my previous job noticed that I had set up on my own. Essentially they liked my work but hated dealing with my employer, hence they had taken their business elsewhere over a year previous.

Other than keeping my profile up to date I'm a very passive LinkedIn user though - I don't use it to look people up. It's also a source of a huge amount of worthless recruiter spam.

You could just combine two separate browsers and use one for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and whatever else you wish for and use the second one while being logged out of social networks.

Why not a create a new Chrome profile that's not signed into Google, and use its Incognito mode?

The size of a LinkedIn profile page:

    <iframe src="LINK TO YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE" height="1" width="1" frameBorder="0"></iframe>

You need a new business model.