This is incredibly important. If you dig deep into why LinkedIn is behaving the way it is, it is definitely not an attempt into protecting users' privacy. It's all about maintaining and expanding the ways it can monetize the data that users provide.

This is the type of thing that we risk loosing as the internet matures and internet companies with vested interests gain more power. Setting this type of precedents will absolutely curtail innovation and freedom in the future. Think about it, would Google have been created in an environment that is overwhelmingly siloed and filled with red tape?

I see parallels to the net neutrality discussion in this.