LinkedIn Issues Statement Saying It Doesn't Break Into Users' Accounts

Here's the full statement from LinkedIn:

"As you may have read recently, a class action lawsuit was filed against LinkedIn last week. The lawsuit alleges that we "break into" the email accounts of our members who choose to upload their email address books to LinkedIn. Quite simply, this is not true, and with so much misinformation out there, we wanted to clear up a few things for our members.

• We do not access your email account without your permission. Claims that we "hack" or "break into" members' accounts are false.
• We never deceive you by "pretending to be you" in order to access your email account.
• We never send messages or invitations to join LinkedIn on your behalf to anyone unless you have given us permission to do so.

We do give you the choice to share your email contacts, so you can connect on LinkedIn with other professionals that you know and trust. We will continue to do everything we can to make our communications about how to do this as clear as possible.

As we've said before, our core value at LinkedIn is Members First. This guides all the decisions that we make when it comes to our members, including how we communicate with them and how we use their data. That's why we felt we needed to explain we believe that the claims in this lawsuit are without merit, and we wanted to correct the false accusations and misleading headlines."