De-anonymizing LinkedIn profile views | Hacker News Reader

De-anonymizing LinkedIn profile views

lite.floodmagazine.com

66 pointsyoungj51 comments

Slightly OT, but can someone explain to me what I'm getting from LinkedIn? I've codified a historical record of my coworkers. Occasionally a recruiter contacts me – 90% of the time, they're bozos carpet bombing by buzzwords.

I've given it something like five years to click and I'm still missing something. It's just not a fun web application to use. Twitter, Facebook, Stack Overflow, Quora and many others do a better job at the tasks LinkedIn half-heartedly attempts. If I want to connect with someone I don't know, I send them an email. The Rube Goldberg business where a chain of connections passes you around always felt weird and imposing to me.

At this point I feel like a cow at the feedlot, and LinkedIn sells me to staffing professionals.

Entirely willing to be put onto the right path, I'm just not seeing it right now.

edit: The score for jobs I've gotten through social sites:

LinkedIn: 0

Facebook: 0

Twitter: 2

My impression of LinkedIn is that it's only appeal is that it's where "everyone is" for work related references.

You get nothing at from it but you feel a need to be there anyway. I guess LinkedIn is OK with that. Like Facebook, you are not their customer but their product.

I've gotten contacted by recruiters from Google, Facebook, and Microsoft through LinkedIn (well a lot of them have been via email, but I imagine that's where they got my contact info from).

Also, I've found it helpful when I need to ask for advice on a particular topic and am having trouble thinking of anyone to ask. Scanning through my contact list on LinkedIn will often jog my memory.

Not off topic at all. LinkedIn has the reputation for being the goto site for business recommendations. And many who are technology inclined will flock there rather than building an online resume/presence -- or for people that have little time for the same.

Furthe, LinkedIn is all about getting you to pay the non trivial amount of $25 a month. It is a rip. Also, LinkedIn has a boring interface and hasn't changed much in years.

I'd love to see a new twist on professional networking. Linking it to facebook is bad (mixing social and work) and a pure job board has been done to death.

Like you, I get nothing from it but I know salespeople who couldn't live without it. Want to get a meeting with someone at X corp? Try LinkedIn. That line went cold? Get back on LinkedIn and find someone else.

Great for finding prospects you don't really know, pointless for people you know anyway.

Maybe this sounds strange, but I couldn't be happier that people are paying for the privilege of contacting me. In my experience it keeps the signal/noise ratio high, and I'm perfectly happy to let LinkedIn keep the fees as long as I keep getting value out of the messages.

I've been contacted by recruiters from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and many more through LinkedIn. When one of these guys contacts you, it's a free pass through the most frustrating part of a job search: getting someone to even give your resume a second glance. Those contacts have resulted in two job offers I didn't accept and one that I did. Considering that just one accepted job offer is a life-changing event, LinkedIn has justified all the time I've spent on it (not much) many times over.

We use it all the time when researching prospective hires. It's surprising how often they're linked to somebody we know, so we can get references they weren't expecting.

The bizarre thing about LI is you have all your current colleagues on it - why would you want them to know you were looking for another job?

Collectively, you don't. You'd be surprised however how much this can help individually, especially with former colleagues.

Well yes quite - so where's the mechanism to exclude "my boss" or "managers in my company" from such updates?

The Inbox?

Uh what?

If you edit your profile or set your status to "is looking for a new job" everyone gets notified. Have you used LI?

Linked in isn't facebook. If you are using your "status" as a glorified twitter account, you're doing it wrong.

If you are looking for a new job, contact the people you think may be able to help directly via message.

Status messages customized to an audience type in a world of public information being available on google is a bad idea in general, regardless of linked in's behaviors.

Erm yes I know how to send a message thanks. Nevertheless if I update the skills/experience section of my profile, everyone will be notified. There's no way around your cow-orkers knowing that you've updated your CV.

You can turn that off.

Yes but I want people outside the company to see it.

You are "building a personal brand" to assist with your current position. If, your work asks, that is..and if you can "spin" it that way. Perhaps you wish to look current for when asking programming advice.

This is also an opt-in feature of OKCupid.

I personally opted out, because people's whose profile I viewed but didn't contact are exactly the people I don't want contacting me- which they could do if they saw my profile name/info.

Namely, these are all the people whose profile I looked through and said "meh." If they knew who I was they might contact me when I already determined I wasn't interested.

I imagine it might be the same for LinkedIn; say you were looking to headhunt someone but found their resume lacking. Would you really like them to have the option to then contact you and ask for a job?

Re: OKCupid, I left the feature on. I find that it provides some valuable intel. Sometimes, I'll find an unlikely candidate checking my profile out suspiciously often. It sometimes goes somewhere, sometimes not.

Well-worth the hassle of the occasional false positive, in my mind.

I imagine there will be similar utility, at least for certain users, with the LinkedIn feature.

Browse the new profiles using an incognito window first.

If I were going to go through all that effort, I would just contact the person who I was actually interested in. Instead of passively looking at their profile and hoping they would notice and contact me.

When Linkedin released this modal feature - i.e. if you don't agree to release more information to everyone, then we will restrict your usage rights - I placed Linkedin alongside Facebook into the basket of sites where I will actively try to reduce my usage until I can phase them out completely.

I know Linkedin is free, but I have invested a lot of time plowing their fields and cultivating business contacts (from which you make revenue) and now this?

I'm always amazed at the way people will always find a way to be outraged at change.

LinkedIn makes it so if you want to see who's viewing you, you have to agree to be viewable, removing a potential information asymmetry and this is somehow a horrible offense?

I like the change, and I'm glad of it. I like that you can't elect to be hypocritical about profile viewing information. I'll continue ramping up my LinkedIn usage, especially as it seems to only get more valuable for me over time (unlike FB, which has never provided me with any measurable utility.)

I would not go so far as to say I am outraged. Using any site, paid or free is an individual value judgement. Many people may be happy to have competitors, potential new recruits, bosses and employees know you viewed their profile - for me, and how I used Linkedin, its not something I am willing to accept. My choice to leave. Your choice to stay. No outrage here, just a comment.

Not sure I understand why this is such a big problem. Information symmetry seems like a worthy design goal, and if it bothers you that much, there's an easy workaround:

Create a second account for stealth/stalking. Voila - problem solved. Or am I missing something?

I'm really annoyed because there is no middle ground: I have to be completely de-anonymised to get the analytics. Even partial anonymity of the profile gets you absolutely no analytics.

Will I quit LinkedIn? No way at this point; I have way too much invested in it. But as LinkedIn provides no incentive for me to be even partially anonymous as opposed to total anonymity now, I'm conciously making my profile completely anonymous.

You mean it's ok that you can see others but they can't see you?

Not quite. Why not show analytics of others at the same level of anonymity you set? The three levels of anonymity are completely open, the "vague" headline, and completely anonymous. The analytics can be of a similar level. The more open you are the more you learn about viewers of your profile.

The old way was to show (by default) the vague headline of your profile's viewers. The system I describe above is not a big jump from that.

What I find annoying is that for me to get any form of analytics, I have to be completely open. In buzzword compliant words: it is the incongruence between the 3 levels of anonymity and the binary availability of analytics.

Friendster (at least for a while, perhaps still) had a similar feature. If I recall correctly, to see who'd browsed your profile, you had to let others see when you browsed theirs.

I think Orkut as well.

Mixi (the most popular social networking site in Japan) has had this feature since the beginning and it certainly changes how people use the site.

Actually a year or two ago they finally added the ability to delete your tracks after viewing someone else's profile. I think you can only delete 5 per day though, so you still can't stalk on Mixi all day without any trace.

Orkut, Google's old attempt at Social Networking had this feature.

I doubt anybody really cared. This was not really a game changer and was just another feature.

It's a nice feature for your ego to know who is secretly stalking your profile but beyond that (and after the initial novelty) its usage fades.

> Orkut, Google's old attempt at Social Networking

Orkut's still leading in Brazil - http://finchannel.com/Main_News/Tech/72662_Orkut_Continues_t...

Something about Orkut sounding like yogurt in Brazilian Portuguese - http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-brazil-loves-orkut/30...

I really disliked that feature about Orkut. It would even show up when you visited a person's page who wasn't your friend. You had to think twice about visiting someone's page to see what who they are and what they've been up to. In a professional environment however, it can itself act as an introduction if the other person becomes curious to see who you are.

The german facebook ripoff sites studivz, meinvz etc have this feature too. You can opt out though.

Feels like they are holding aspects of the site hostage - only released if you give up more privacy. I am simply not comfortable being forced to give up my privacy in order to use aspects of the site. Would rather pay - to maintain privacy. Lack of concern over 'user privacy' was the primary reason I quit Facebook. If the average person really knew what was going on in the back room connecting all their data - without their knowledge or approval - they would be astonished.

Re: the "what if" Facebook scenario:

And so a thousand jilted exes had their egos soothed.

("OMG, he forgot to opt out, and he's been stalking me every day for two months even though I unfriended him. He's like, totally still into me.")

In practice this would just force stalkers to create fake accounts.

Highly dubious use of the word "stalker" to describe someone who views their ex's Facebook profile compulsively.

This is standard feature, called footprints, on Japanese Social Networks.

Interesting. Are there cultural differences wrt leaving visible footprints? do you need to feel private? is it ok to stare at other people, until they notice you? it can be very different between cultures.

I recently watched Ozu's "Good Morning" (1959) and was struck by the way people would come to a house, open the door, step in, and then call / announce themselves. Kids, relatives, neighbours, even a traveling salesman. I always assumed a closed house door invited people to knock and wait outside...

LinkedIn have always had the feature if you had a premium account you could always see the names of your visitors. I guess they're changing it now to make it available to all of their users.

I'm sure if fb had a feature to allow checking who has seen your profile, a lot of people would be happy to pay for it. Maybe it could be a new way for facebook to make money? I'm not pretty sure facebook users have more value than they cost to facebook (based on money from ads (to my knowledge, the only way fb gets money from users 'directly) vs bandwidth/server/development expenses)

studiVZ (German Facebook clone, something like six million members, 17 million if you add the other two VZ social networks) has always (or at least as far as I remember) allowed you to see who viewed your profile. You can opt-out so others won’t see you but you will still be able to see who viewed your profile.

I looked for this on LinkedIn briefly and couldn't find it. Apparently you have to opt in to letting users whose profile you've viewed learn about you.

The default setting is for the text to read "someone at SOME TYPE OF COMPANY has viewed your profile".

Just checked LI - I can manage how somebody will see me if I visited his or her page. I can remain fully anonymous if I want to. So FB or LI do not de-anonymize profile views but users themselvs when they want to. No reason for panic.

(Btw, it might be just me, but the byline (Posted by...) hides the word 'stalk' in the title. It becomes semi-transparent if I mouseover article text, but it looks amateur.)

You can opt out of this feature. AFAIK, the feature that you don't get is the month-by-month tabulation of search hits for your profile.

xing a networking site like linkedin, already has this feature since a long time. But you can only use it if you are pro member and pay for that feature. You have to pay to see who stalked you, normal user don't see any details who visited their profile.

Punchline: you have to pay money on xing to see who's stalking you ;0

I thought LinkedIn was like this before? I always saw "John Doe and 6 others have viewed your profile. Sign up to a premium account to see who they were". In fact I know some people who had the premium account exactly so they could see this information.

Thought the same, but could not find details on the comparison page...

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