LinkedIn does away with controversial email service

LinkedIn has announced that it’s doing away with some of its services, and among these is Intro, a tool that allowed iPhone users who installed it to view in the email certain information about the sender if the sender was also a LinkedIn user.

Intro was introduced last year in October, and immediately sparked a controversy.

In order to function as intended, the emails received and sent via the app would be re-routed via LinkedIn’s servers, allowing the company to scrape, collect and store their content, and potentially use it for their own purposes.

Despite the critics, LinkedIn kept the offering. Still, given this last announcement, it seems logical to assume that Intro didn’t attract many users.

Deep Nishar, senior VP of products and user experience, said that they are shutting down Intro (and audio-presentation-uploading service Slidecast) due to a tightening of focus.

“We are shutting down LinkedIn Intro as of March 7, 2014. Users of Intro will be able to uninstall it between now and March 7 and switch back to their previous mail accounts,” he wrote on Friday. “Members can continue to use Rapportive, which brings the power of LinkedIn to Gmail.”