Careers 2.0: Advanced Privacy section lists employers I haven't contacted

Question

On the "Privacy Settings" page in Careers 2.0, I selected "Block all messages and searches" in the "Employer Searches and Messaging" section.

This caused an "Advanced Privacy" section to appear, it says:

Below are employers who you have previously messaged or who listed jobs you've applied to. These people can view your profile and send you messages. You can revoke access to any or all of them.

There are a couple of companies listed, but I haven't contacted any companies.

Some details on my activity in case it sheds light on the situation:
A few weeks ago, I made my profile visible for the first time.
I selected "Not looking, but open to being contacted" and made my profile public.

Today when I made the profile private and selected "Block all messages and searches", the list of companies appeared.

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My questions:
1) Why would the list of companies appear when I haven't been in contact with any companies?

2) If I had been in contact with a company, where would that be shown? (This list only appears when I block employer contact).

Answer 1

1. Because we had a nasty bug.
2. It would be shown in this section, as an option to cease communications with those companies and block them from viewing your profile.

First the bug. That list of employers accidentally included employers who had "saved" your profile but had not yet messaged you. This has been fixed. To be clear, those employers couldn't actually see your profile after you did the initial block of searches, however we were recognizing them as someone you had a previous conversation with for the purposes of the advanced privacy feature.

The purpose of advanced privacy is to give you control on a granular level over who can see your profile and send you messages. When you choose to "block all messages and searches" it does just that...mostly. There are sometimes a list of employers with whom you've interacted with in the past by either messaging with them or applying to one of their jobs. When you effectively block all employers with the first setting, we want to give you the extra control to continue the conversation (or await a reply from an employer whose job you applied to) that has already started.

It's an edge case for sure, but we believe it's the right thing to do. Please let us know if you have any more problems with this setting.