What a silly title. Obviously if a company acquires another company they will acquire the email contacts and accounts as well. And LinkedIn has the right to connect accounts they own across their web properties.
The rest of the article is bottom tier conspiracy theory that this is a stealthy way for LinkedIn to secretly sell all their PII. This is dumb for a variety of reasons:
1) Linkedin makes all their money selling people ads and recruiting messages, they lose this if they sell direct access to their users.
2) 500m emails sale value isn't worth jack shit to a company the size of LI/Microsoft (see point 1).
The rest of the article is bottom tier conspiracy theory that this is a stealthy way for LinkedIn to secretly sell all their PII. This is dumb for a variety of reasons:
1) Linkedin makes all their money selling people ads and recruiting messages, they lose this if they sell direct access to their users.
2) 500m emails sale value isn't worth jack shit to a company the size of LI/Microsoft (see point 1).