LinkedIn Data Export: [Almost] None Shall Pass

Back in late 2018, with no announcement and under cover of night, LinkedIn changed their data export feature so that the only emails you could download were those of 1st-degree connections who opted in to making their email addresses downloadable in others' data exports.

They did this under the guise of improving user privacy, but most of us quickly came to the conclusion that this was a move by LinkedIn to prevent competition and to force users into buying paid subscriptions to be able to communicate with LinkedIn connections.

For those interested, I just downloaded all my 6762 LinkedIn Connections today, and only 186 (2.75%) of them had email addresses in the Email column. That's a large enough sample size to say with confidence that you essentially cannot get your connections' emails.

I have to applaud LinkedIn's management for being so good at taking away what was once free and charging for it, and for protecting their castle with so many moats and walls.

I will say this, though: U.S. courts have definitively decided that LinkedIn profile data is in the public domain and therefore belongs as much to the public and to the profiled person as it does to LinkedIn itself. Perhaps this judicial reality is why LinkedIn continues to build and fortify all these artificial data access and use barriers.