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October 24, 2013 11:01 am GMT
Earlier today LinkedIn launched a new iPad app and what appeared to be a pretty slick feature for iOS Mail called Intro. It presents the a profile of email senders right within the body of the message, with more details available on a tap in a similar manner to other email tools like Rapportive. Intro appears to deliver all of the details of your contacts to your fingertips in a nifty interface. Its also a spectacularly bad idea for you to activate this feature. See, iOS Mail does not have an official extensible framework. Apple does not provide any APIs or frameworks to developers that would allow this kind of modification of its interface. Instead, LinkedIn is acting as a man in the middle by intercepting (with your permission) your email and injecting HTML code into it that enables a style sheet to pop open over your content, containing an extended profile that offers information on positions held, connections and a bunch of other stuff. The implementation, explained in a LinkedIn blog post, is pretty admirable from an engineering perspective. As hacks go, this is a really clever solution to Apples fairly restrictive Mail.app policies. But when you dig into the methods that LinkedIn is using to enable Intro, it becomes clear that this is a much more sticky proposition than it appears. Right off the bat, the installation process requires that you install a configuration profile that contains a set of signing certificates and an encrypted profile. Those enable LinkedIn to (presumably securely) obtain permission to act as a middle man between you and your email provider. This proxy server is what is used to intercept (yes, as in grab, open and modify) your email and inject the code that makes Intro possible. There dont appear to be any humans involved in the process, and one would pray that your email contents remain un-readable somehow but Im not sure how thats possible. The top bar that enables the feature is not a field or part of the header, its additional content that gets inserted into the body of the email. LinkedIn appears to confirm that this is how this works. We understand that operating an email proxy server carries great responsibility. We respect the fact that your email may contain very personal or sensitive information, and we will do everything we can to make sure that it is
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/9Ha2fDCsdkI/
LinkedIn's Intro Feature Is Very Cool, And A Spectacularly Bad Idea
Earlier today LinkedIn launched a new iPad app and what appeared to be a pretty slick feature for iOS Mail called Intro. It presents the a profile of email senders right within the body of the message, with more details available on a tap in a similar manner to other email tools like Rapportive. Intro appears to deliver all of the details of your contacts to your fingertips in a nifty interface. Its also a spectacularly bad idea for you to activate this feature. See, iOS Mail does not have an official extensible framework. Apple does not provide any APIs or frameworks to developers that would allow this kind of modification of its interface. Instead, LinkedIn is acting as a man in the middle by intercepting (with your permission) your email and injecting HTML code into it that enables a style sheet to pop open over your content, containing an extended profile that offers information on positions held, connections and a bunch of other stuff. The implementation, explained in a LinkedIn blog post, is pretty admirable from an engineering perspective. As hacks go, this is a really clever solution to Apples fairly restrictive Mail.app policies. But when you dig into the methods that LinkedIn is using to enable Intro, it becomes clear that this is a much more sticky proposition than it appears. Right off the bat, the installation process requires that you install a configuration profile that contains a set of signing certificates and an encrypted profile. Those enable LinkedIn to (presumably securely) obtain permission to act as a middle man between you and your email provider. This proxy server is what is used to intercept (yes, as in grab, open and modify) your email and inject the code that makes Intro possible. There dont appear to be any humans involved in the process, and one would pray that your email contents remain un-readable somehow but Im not sure how thats possible. The top bar that enables the feature is not a field or part of the header, its additional content that gets inserted into the body of the email. LinkedIn appears to confirm that this is how this works. We understand that operating an email proxy server carries great responsibility. We respect the fact that your email may contain very personal or sensitive information, and we will do everything we can to make sure that it isOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/9Ha2fDCsdkI/
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