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Why Is LinkedIn Taunting Users with Pictures of Their Exes?

I am not a big LinkedIn user. But every time I sign in, a weird thing happens.

I am not a big LinkedIn user. But every time I sign in, a weird thing happens. When the home page loads, there she is, starting right back at me–smiling actually–the first girl I ever fell in love with. We broke up almost eight years ago, and I've only seen her once since then.

She's in the middle of a box on top of the feed that's asking me to sign into my Gmail account to find more connections. She's surrounded by updates about people's careers and statistics about how complete my profile is and links to people I don't know with impressive job titles. I don't deal with any of that, though, because when I sign in and that avatar jars me into a nostalgic fit, and I close the window.

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Why do they do that? It would be one thing if it happened once. Heck, every now and then I'll see one of her updates in my Facebook News Feed, and it's whatever. But generally that happens like once a year or something terribly seldom like that. Not on LinkedIn. It's there literally every time I sign in–which is only once, maybe twice a month, but still.

It happened again the other day, and I couldn't take it any more. I tweeted. It was more out of curiosity than anything, and I even thought of a corny joke about why LinkedIn would put me through this mild emotional torture. (I'm being dramatic.) "I figure it's their way of telling me to work harder," I said.

I didn't expect to have one, two, three, and more people reply immediately and say the same thing happens to them.

@adamclarkestes that happened to me recently too! we don't even have mutual connections or work in the same industry.

— Lauren Tara LaCapra (@LaurenLaCapra) March 19, 2013

Now, I'm no data scientist, no statistician, but it seems like half a dozen people reporting the same problem at the same time is a little more than a coincidence. But why? And even more urgently, how does LinkedIn know exactly which face to show us?

I chatted with a few of the people that replied, and it was a mixed bag. Some of them said they were directly connected to that person. Others said it's very likely that they share some connections but couldn't imagine how the social network could know about such an intimate part of their life. It's not like LinkedIn has a relationship status or anything like that. A couple people even said they weren't connected to their ex at all, though that's hard to believe in this world. (Looking at you, Kevin Bacon.)

The more I thought about this, the more puzzled I got. LinkedIn does allow you to import contacts from services like Gmail and Yahoo!, but there's no simple way to connect to Facebook. Maybe it had something to do with messages or whose profile you've looked at the most. People don't seriously stalk their exes on LinkedIn, do they?

So I sent them an email. A LinkedIn spokesperson replied with a statement about how those images were powered by "a sophisticated algorithm." She continued, "Many signals go into this, including factors such as common connections, companies, schools and more." In other words, LinkedIn has an algorithm that knows who's close to you. Good luck finding out how it works.

At this point, I've given up on figuring out exactly what's going on and let me imagination wander a bit. Imagine what a powerful tool it would be for a social network to know how to trigger its users. The funny thing is, seeing that picture did make me sort of second guess my profile. Maybe I should jazz it up. What if LinkedIn is showing her my face and she clicks on it? Better make sure my business is in order.

Image via Flickr