LinkedIn's "people you may know" is notorious for its creepy accuracy. Not only colleagues, current and past, but friends, acquaintances, ex girlfriends, university professors, landlords, hairdressers and more.. The least paranoid explanation is that, unlike me and you, many others click "find my friends" and let LinkedIn slurp their thousand-entries address books.
I imagined so too, but what were they basing this match on? The people they were suggesting did not, or at least should not, have had this particular email address since it was created after I had worked with them. They only ever emailed (for group meetups/drinks) on my "personal" email address.
Now I can recommendations for other people in the same company, previous colleagues who were at the same company at the same time, "friends of friends" and all that makes sense. But creepy as you say. Maybe the guys who wrote the algorithm now work for the NSA...
