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Comment by jsty | Hacker News Reader

Between the "About Us" / "Team" / ... company website pages and LinkedIn profiles, I'd wager a majority of white-collar employees already have much more than the contents of Humans.txt linking back to details of their employment

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Yes but this is easily harvested. Ironically, by design this would make that far easier.

You could probably work out my mother's maiden name from Facebook, but I wouldn't make a SecurityQuestions.txt file and chuck it on websites I make.

Yes but social engineering doesn't really scale, does it? You need to craft each message manually and adapt it to each company. The name search might not be the most complex part

You would be surprised what people (in receptions in particular) sometimes let slide when you know the name and where some person is employed.

Yes but that's why I say it doesn't scale if you have to go there in person. So having an automated way of getting names is not particularly helpful. The hard and time-consuming part is going there in person or calling the company.

https://www.google.com/humans.txt

https://www.netflix.com/humans.txt

LinkedIn actually has very strong safeguards in place on their API to prevent such automated crawling.

Those "safeguards" are called Premium Business, Sales Navigator Core, Recruiter Lite and LinkedIn Learning ;-)

And all of those are abused heavily by debt collectors, investigators and many others.

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