LinkedIn has issued a cease and desist letter to the Sell Hack extension for Google Chrome, which exposes the contact details of its members.
Sell Hack is available as a free extension to the Chrome browser that, once installed, will pop up a “hack in” button on LinkedIn profiles and lets users view other LinkedIn members’ email addresses without first having to connect on the social networking site.
LinkedIn said it was taking legal action over the plug-in and advised users to uninstall it.
Sell Hack’s website claims: “The data we process is all publicly available. We just do the heavy lifting and complicated computing to save you time. We aren’t doing anything malicious to the LinkedIn website.”
It said previously Linkedin had insisted the tool was created for marketing professionals and that all data is publicly available.
SellHack has disabled the plug-in in compliance with the cease and desist letter from LinkedIn.
“We are building a better product that does not conflict with LinkedIn’s terms of service,” it said on its blog.
