Tell HN: LinkedIn is giving out my phone number without consent (?) | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: LinkedIn is giving out my phone number without consent (?)

26 pointssyndacks25 comments

Hi -- I get spam calls from recruiters and other sales people. One time I picked up and asked them where they got my number and they said, "LinkedIn". No where on my contact info is my number divulged, nor do I have any resume or anything that I know of that gives away my phone number.

How do I fix this? Thanks.

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Recruiters and sales people use a plethora of tools that boil down to databases containing personal data from a variety of sources all linked together. It's very likely the recruiter was on your LinkedIn page and had a browser plugin that showed your phone number.

There has been a bunch of leaks associated with LinkedIn [0] that could be related to it. About a year ago I started getting the stupid "I've got your password, send me some bitcoin" spam with the password I only used on LinkedIn. I wouldn't be surprised if the same leak contained phone numbers as well.

That said, if someone cold-calls me to offer a stupid position or something, I reply that I've been out of this business for years and have been selling cars for a while, and we've got a great Ford for them on the lot that they should definitely com see it right now. The reaction is usually worth the wasted time.

[0] https://cybernews.com/news/stolen-data-of-500-million-linked...

Not sure if they LinkedIn offers something like this or not, but one strategy some outbound lead gen places use is to actually get the phone call connected, rather than just giving out lists of phone numbers (those are valuable after all).

Also, Google your number and see where else it shows up.

Even assuming that the shady person is telling the truth about their data source, there might not necessarily be anything technically wrong with LinkedIn at this time.

Have you ever used LinkedIn to apply for jobs at anytime in the past?

It seems trivial for any shady recruiter out there use any downtime in their business to post fake job ads and gather potential contacts and recruits to use in the future, or to gather contact information to sell to marketers later on. I'd bet that identity thieves and shady characters are having a field day on there even if LinkedIn is technically perfect.

LinkedIn is probably not the culprit.

I locked down my shit and was still having recruiters contact me with old info so I started asking the recruiters where they were getting my info from.

They bought it, from little shitty bump in the night data brokers who were reselling old LinkedIn data dumps. Which explained why many of them had old info on me.

I have been going after my profile on many of these brokers. Generally with success but in many cases it meant having the lawyer send them a nastygram.

I also explained to the recruiters the data they were buying was old linkedin data. Hopefully that also screwed over some of the brokers.

Almost for certain the person you spoke to, wasn't the same person who bought the shady/stale leadgen dump. For just about all parties involved, they don't care if it's stale if they still hook a few heads and get their finders/placement fees.

Many recruiters orgs are very small and there are individual headhunters out there.

It's data broker plugins that layer on top of linkedin like https://www.gem.com/

I was shocked few years ago to discover my e-mail was set in my profile to be publicly visible. Just in case verify it's not the same with your phone number.

This happened to me and led to a targeted work phishing scam where the scammer posed as our CEO and emailed my personal gmail.

Would have been a closer call if the CEO hadn’t died the year before…

I deleted my LinkedIn account a while ago, largely because I set my email to not be visible, but was still getting recruiter spam on a daily basis, and they all said they got my email address from LinkedIn.

Since deleting it, I almost never get emails from recruiters anymore, so I have to imagine they were telling the truth.

Probably in https://www.apollo.io/

Opt-out for Apollo[0]. They'll tell you if they have data on you or not. For example, my work email was able to be deleted but one of my personal emails had no data.

[0]: https://www.apollo.io/privacy-policy/remove/

> We will honor your request by removing your profile from our services, and we will retain the email address you enter for purposes of storing and respecting your opt-out preference.

*whistling* That's some catch, that Catch-22.

How do they track people without consent while things like GDPR exist? They just don't care?

GDPR does not apply in the US.

Edit: are you asking about the “every lead on earth” bit and how they do that in EU? It’s simply marketing fluff, ie a lie.

> They just don't care?

Exactly, they don't care, as the GDPR is a EU regulation and doesn't apply in the US.

I had this happen to me today, at first they claimed it was linkedin, turns out it was a company called "Rocket reach" rocketreach.co. They mine data from everywhere and you have to "claim" your profile to submit a takedown request.

1. Uninstall the LinkedIn app from your smartphone if you haven't already.

2. Remove the recovery phone number from your account and use another 2FA method if possible.

3. There is a buried link to the data deletion page (at least for Europeans) where you can let LinkedIn delete all uploaded/synced contacts. [1]

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a563126/deleti...

(Not affiliated with LinkedIn, just went through the same thing)

LinkedIn algorithm somehow rates me high on their rankings for python devs in London. This has the impact of recruiters often correctly guessing my email address based on my employer domain and bombarding me with emails. I used to get at least two or three calls on my work desk, where the recruiters call the switchboard and ask for me by name. Needless to say, I have removed the name of my employer from my LinkedIn profile, nothing good comes from attaching too much information to a public profile.

> guessing my email address based on my employer domain

Recruiters contacting you through your work facilities!? That's new to me. Poaching straight to their face.

I wouldn't be surprised if LinkedIn did shared your phone number but keep in mind that recruiters might not be totally honest with you.

Remind me of that time when a recruiter calls me, says I'm not interested and I hang up, then my colleague's phone start to ring, same recruiter.

We ask him how he got our phone number because our phones were provided by our company and the numbers were not publicized.

"I received the list from a colleague, we have different way of sourcing our data, blah, blah, blah".

Few days later, we learned that some guy from HR from our company left and sold the employees list to some recruiters.

There's data providers that sell this info.

If you didn't put it on LinkedIn, the spam callers got it through different ways (sales tooling, direct from data providers, leaks, etc.) If you're putting your phone number out anywhere (even in the signature of your email), they're collecting that info and selling it

It’s not LinkedIn directly. They have a CRM that combines LinkedIn with additional data sources.

They don’t always know how this works, but even the one who explained this to me wasn’t sure where the leadgen service was getting its data.

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