Tech company to pay big after class action lawsuit over user emails

According to various media reports, LinkedIn will now have to pay a hefty sum for taking its reminder emails tactic a bit too far.

In an email sent by the company on Friday, users of the site were notified that they were eligible for a class action settlement related to email marketing.

According to report by Mashable, the company has agreed to pay out $13 million to users who may have been impacted by its Add Connections service. The settlement is a result of a 2013 class action lawsuit against the company file in California.

The LinkedIn Add Connections program allows users to import their personal contacts into the company’s system and then have invitations to connect on LinkedIn went out to these contacts on their behalf.

However, if a recipient of the invitation email did not accept or respond to the invitation within a specific period of time, the company would then follow up with two emails repeating the invitation.

Big fans of LinkedIn would consider it as thorough follow-up, but others that are less familiar would consider the messages as annoying spam. This is made worse if the recipient of the invitation thinks the spammy messages are coming from you, a person they know, rather than a third party.

READ: LinkedIn acquires training site Lynda.com

The bone of contention in this situation is LinkedIn’s email persistence without the users consent. On the settlement website, Gilardi & Co., the legal firm handling the payout of the settlement sum, states, ”The Court found that members consented to importing their contacts and sending the connection invitation, but did not find that members consented to LinkedIn sending the two reminder emails.”

Although the company is making such a massive payout to address legal claims around email abuse, LinkedIn itself has not directly admitted any wrongdoing in the matter.

The deadline for filing a claim is December 14.