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I have a hard time calling it linkedin's data when it belongs to the users.

I may be wrong here but I assume linkedin's user's don't have a strong preference if their data is searchable by anyone or just people who pay linkedin thousands of dollars for one of their paid accounts.

How do you know the purpose is to prevent scraping? It could be some general marketing drive or general snoop for whatever other invented privacy invasive reason.

Because linkedin has been involved in a few lawsuits to try to stop people from user's data from their site. And the browser extensions they scan for are scraping extensions.

I figured it was to help them track users.