YES. Straight from the horse’s mouth: “the people you may know could have been uploaded to LinkedIn through auto authorization if you had at any time your LinkedIn account open and accessed any of your emails through the same browser.” Also “there is not a setting to specifically turn this feature off.”
Here’s the full text of my correspondence with them, through the linkedin help center interface:
Member (05/18/2016 14:39 CST)
Subject: How can I prevent Linkedin from accessing my gmail contacts?
Your Question: I’ve never knowingly given linkedin permission to access my gmail contacts, but it keeps suggesting I connect on linkedin with people whose only connection to me is messages through gmail – and it usually happens suspiciously right after I send and receive a few emails from that person. This behavior has in the past included people whom I know do not have a linkedin account, since it suggests that I “invite them to linkedin” – which means the other person cannot be allowing linkedin access to their emails, it must be through my linkedin account.
How do I keep linkedin from accessing my gmail contacts? How do I delete the list of contacts that linkedin has already harvested from my gmail account?
Thank you