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Comment by jeffkumar | Hacker News Reader

These are my first degree connections. I don't see what's wrong with getting a list of my own connections.

What's wrong is that you're trying to violate their email privacy settings. The 5% of emails you did get are from the contacts who shared their email with you and enabled the "Allow connection to export emails" setting; the other 95% did not choose to let you export their email address, as is their right since it belongs to them.

Originally I was the one who put all the email addresses into linkedin to begin with (in fact back when I started using linkedin, you needed their valid address to link up with them). So it's my own contact info list, or was. Since I couldn't get the info back out, I ultimately deleted my linkedin account.

I think this is the point that most people miss in the first place!

LinkedIn harvested peoples contacts under the guise that they were going to help you find connections, but instead they spammed your entire contact list through their outlook plugin and now when you try to get your lists and contacts out they make it extremely painful.

It's on their contact page and they are a first degree connection. I can view it by going to their page.

But that's a different setting. Consent for Linkedin to show you my email does not imply consent for my email to be exported into a third party list.

Again, I think you'd benefit from researching the Cambridge Analytica scandal to understand what's going on here. There was a time when social media worked according to the intuition you're describing, where you should be able to export from the platform any information you can see on the platform, and it led to results that the public and regulators really did not like. Companies like Cambridge Analytica were able to build detailed profiles on Person X, without Person X's consent or knowledge, simply because Person Y who happened to be friends with them agreed to share data with a Facebook quiz. So now that's not how things are done.

I understand the problem with building a caricature of other people, but when it comes to your own contact email list on a platform, you should be able to access that. Essentially, not being able to download that is away for them to prevent you from de-platforming. I argue, that they aren't truly trying to safeguard against automation, that's a disguise for trying to prevent you from de-platforming because then they can't monetize as well if you become independent and use your own direct outreach for your customer list. I'd hope they would have the best intentions, but this process has lead me to believe otherwise.

Did you confirm with each of your contacts that they want to be on your direct outreach list? If not, why should you be able to de-platform with their emails?

I don’t think this is about ignoring consent. It’s about who controls relationships. These are mutual, first-degree connections, and the emails are intentionally visible to me.

LinkedIn isn’t protecting people from misuse here; it’s preventing portability. If the concern were outreach consent, that could be handled with clearer user controls. Blocking access entirely keeps relationships dependent on the platform, which conveniently aligns with their business incentives.

Again, there's a very clear user control. On the email visibility settings page, there's a toggle named "Allow connection to export emails". The 5% of contacts who had an email in your data dump are the 5% of people who've chosen to let you export their email by enabling this toggle.

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