Your Personal Details Are Not Secure on LinkedIn
I'm throwing this article together really quickly as it's Friday and nearing the end of the working week and I'm going to grab a beer on the way home.
I received an email this afternoon from a company that I'd requested some information from a couple of years ago, so I thought I'd take a look at what they were doing these days and also, as someone who has LinkedIn Sales Navigator thought I'd check out the company and the person that sent me the message.
As I and probably countless other people do I got distracted by other profiles and clicked through a few ending up on the profile of a young person, probably in her 20's with an attractive profile picture.
What many users of LinkedIn don't realise is that if you subscribe to Sales Navigator or Recruiter you get to see exponentially more information about someone without actually being one of their connections.
Within a few moments viewing this profile I noticed that a CV was attached as a document, as you can with LinkedIn's SlideShare feature. Given that LinkedIn pretty much represents an online CV anyway I thought it odd and took a look.
The attached CV was typical of any normal CV including full name, home address, personal email accounts, date of birth, two mobile phone numbers for a UK and European mobile, extensive work and personal history. Now this information, provided freely in the pursuit of a job to a company that has a duty of care over that information is one thing. Hosting it on a platform for many tens of thousands of people to access without your explicit consent or knowledge is another.
I'm sure deep down in LinkedIn's terms and conditions you waive away your rights to any information you put on their platform. The reason for writing this was to just flag up to the more trusting, less cynical, unaware users of LinkedIn to be careful about what you add to your profile, you don't know who's viewing it.
I messaged the person in question to let them know and hope that they take action to secure their personally identifiable data before someone with different intentions finds it.
Please like and share this post to help other LinkedIn users to be aware that their personal details aren't always secure on this platform.
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6 年Thanks for sharing James.
Expert at helping you get the leads & sales from LinkedIn you want with 600+ profile recommendations. Use it in a human way to demonstrate value, values & trust so you can get more clients and only meet good people.
6 年Actually that is not quite the case (sorry!). You get the same visibility of profiles at level one, two and an increased view of three but what you have witnessed here is someone putting to much personal information in the public aspects of their profile - which is both naive and dangerous (as you rightly flag). LinkedIn is quite well engineered as a platform so for example phone numbers - if you put your phone number in the phone number box (not in the public part of your profile!) then LinkedIn will only expose this to people you are connected with (i.e. you have accepted them or vice versa) and to people you send a connection invite too. Now as long as you don't connect to random strangers or invite them to connect you are golden! The scary part for me is all the "free" ad ons that expose details within LinkedIn (names of which are wide and various) who profess to expose phone numbers and more. What you don't realise (unless you read all the terms and conditions as I am sure everyone does?) is that you give all your contact details, your connections contact details and more through an API to that company - giving away all your precious data to get access to other peoples - so what advantage do you gain from that? Hmm. Approach with caution. Best wishes James The Linked In Man