“We are making large, long-term investments on a few big bets, and in order to ensure their success, we need to concentrate on fewer things,” the company said in a blog. “Our goal is to provide our members with seamless experiences – not just individual products – that will help them become more productive and successful professionals.”
It’s quite a turnaround of messaging: When it was launched in October, LinkedIn hailed Intro as a technology feat of wonder: “We have extended Apple’s built-in iOS Mail app, a feat that many people consider to be impossible,” LinkedIn noted in announcing the perk, adding, “We bent technology to our will.”
But security researchers preferred to call it a “hacker’s dream, ripe for use for man-in-the-middle attacks because it exposes Apple mail information to a third-party external drain.
“Intro reconfigures your iOS device (e.g. iPhone, iPad) so that all of your emails go through LinkedIn’s servers,” Bishop Fox analysts Vinnie Liu and Carl Livitt explained at the time. “You read that right. Once you install the Intro app, all of your emails, both sent and received, are transmitted via LinkedIn’s servers. LinkedIn is forcing all your IMAP and SMTP data through their own servers and then analyzing and scraping your emails for data pertaining to…whatever they feel like.”
They added, “if I were the NSA…and I hear everyone’s mobile phones were routing their emails through LinkedIn…well I know where I’m having my next birthday party.”
LinkedIn vehemently denied that it would be using the data for any purpose other than to offer the aforementioned functionality, and offered details on the security measures it took for the service, such as isolating the Intro environment as a separate high security segment from the rest of LinkedIn systems as a matter of best practice. It also published a Privacy Pledge meant to address some of the concerns.
But in the end, it would appear that Intro just wasn’t enough of a technology feat to keep around. Something else might be on the horizon though.
“While Intro is going away, we will continue to work on bringing the power of LinkedIn to wherever our members work,” said the company. “Email, where the average professional spends more than a quarter of their time, is one of those places, so we’ll continue to look for ways to bring this kind of functionality to our members through existing partnerships.”
Users of Intro will be able to uninstall it between now and March 7 and switch back to their previous mail accounts. Members can however continue to use Rapportive, LinkedIn’s Gmail integration.