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LinkedIn Prevents You from Deplatforming
45 points by jeffkumar 42 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 46 comments
So I realized, I have a good set of contacts on LinkedIn that I want to be able to segment and reach out to this year. When I tried to download all my data, I realized that 95% of all the contacts did not have emails. So I then decided to go through each profile sequentially and look at the contact info and get the email and fill out my spreadsheet. After I spend an hour and got about 200 contacts, I got a warning that I was using an automation tool and that I needed to click to comply to not use an automation tool anymore. However, I never used an automation tool in the first place for this. I manually was extracting the emails available to me through my own contact list Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a solution?


Similar thing happened to me. Randomly one of my LinkedIn posts got a ton of likes, so I figured I would look through the list of people who liked and try to figure out where they were coming from/if they would be interesting to reach out to.

After viewing a 100 or so profiles, I was logged out of LinkedIn and when I tried to log back in my account was suspended. I was in LinkedIn jail for like a week, and when I was finally able to login again I got the automatic tool warning and had to agree that I wouldn’t use one again (even though I never had used one).


they did the same to me just by going through the job listings and x-ing out the ones that I wasn't interested in. of course for some reason that doesn't really work, the keep coming back, but wth, might as well try to keep down the noise.

you have been suspended for the use of automation


An aside, but…

> of course for some reason that doesn't really work, the keep coming back

What the heck is that about? It’s deeply frustrating.


Not using linked in is the solution. It's a cess pool and terrible at offering what it advertises. I have a profile where my bio starts with the fact you wont reach me on linked in and to email me instead. This works for me, but mileage my vary.


I’m sure that recruiters are going to scour the Internet looking for you.

I created my LinkIn account in 2012. By then I had been a developer for 15 years in Atlanta and knew all of the local recruiters and had met some in person. For the next 8 years, LinkedIn really didn’t serve a purpose. When I looked for a job in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018, I just reached out to my network and interviews and offers fell into my lap. Admittedly they were just regular old enterprise dev jobs in Atlanta.

But in 2020, things changed. AWS reached out to me about a remote position in the consulting department (ProServe full time with the standard four year package) and after that my last two jobs have been based on either targeted outreach on LinkedIn where I was an industry expert in a niche of AWS that most people don’t have (2023) or an internal recruiter reaching out to me on LinkedIn 2024.


> I’m sure that recruiters are going to scour the Internet looking for you.

They don't have to do that. Apparently there are services which link any known email address, mobile phone etc. to your LinkedIn account through a browser addon even when you didn't hand these over to LinkedIn.

I know because my mom was called several times on her mobile phone (which has a number not in any phone book) by a very aggressive and disrespectful recruiter looking for me while I even was not looking for a job. (her first initial and mine are the same).

Only when I threatened him to report him and his company to LinkedIn and the authorities, and blocking him on LinkedIn the calls stopped.


Like I said, mileage may vary. I can see how for some roles it would be useful, clearly it must be. It cant all be braindead takes, lies, and self-aggrandizing. However, in some countries linkedin has strong competition and poor presence. My stance is that if you value your time you wont use linkedin. It is an enormous time waste, which unlike conventional social media doesnt even entertain.

Saying linked in is good for jobs is like saying tinder is good for dating, or facebook is good for socialising. It sure can be, but the quality and substance of what youre after does need to factor in, and so does the time you spent there over higher value time sinks. For me, tinder does not serve my needs, and neither does linked in. Both offer poor signal to noise and terrible time economy.


Can’t apply to YC without a LinkedIn profile, AIUI.


What does it offer? It's bad at jobs. But it's an alternative to business cards and Facebook.


Like it or not, LinkedIn is still by far the most used platform by recruiters (agency and internal) looking to hire. I despise the platform but it's undeniably valuable as your career progresses and the probability of being approached by a recruiter increases.

Ultimately, if you're not looking for work, there's zero value in LinkedIn. Realistically, most people choose or need to look for a new job eventually and in that scenario, LinkedIn is by far the most effective platform to increase your odds on finding a new job.


To add, I'm a year into starting my product-dev agency and trying with figure out a stable lead gen model.

Tons of courses and posts say that LinkedIn is their most effective Lead gen model.

I'm yet to make it work for me, but it seems like it works for them.


I've never needed LinkedIn in a 20 year career. I think you're way over estimating the so called "value" you get from this platform.


I have gotten plenty of value out of the platform - including BigTech companies reaching out to me. One offer I accepted and where I worked for almost four years paying way more working remotely than I could have made locally.

My last two jobs have also come from LinkedIn. Exactly how am i supposed to find remote jobs?

And I have been working for 30 years…


Because of an anecdote/data point of one? Odd take.

Networking is wildly better, but you know what makes it easier? Having a Rolodex of people I’ve worked with that shows where they’re currently at.


If you aren't sure where people are you haven't been networking with them.


Record a video of yourself manually doing this, and then file a small claims lawsuit demanding they restore your access with the video submitted as proof, once they eventually lock you out. You don’t have to claim for money, you can simply claim for restoration of service, or you can indicate that if they fail to provide access to your data, that you seek damages equal to the business and personal value of your “Rolodex file” that they misappropriated from you. (If you’re not familiar, look it up, and be sure to use that term so that the court understands the gravity of the situation.) (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)


To be clear: there is no legal requirement for LinkedIn to restore service. They reserve the right to deny service to anyone for any or no reason.

But they might restore service even though the courts won’t “make” them.


Aren't you fairly likely to get a default judgement because they're unlikely to show up to court?


Perhaps! But then you'd get to file a lien on Microsoft, and what a glorious day that would be. Frame it for the office wall!

The point here is that, if we don't exercise the tools available to us to have a human being judge whether Microsoft's behavior is unjust, then we'll never know if a human being would have judged Microsoft's behavior (and terms of service) as unjust. Is LinkedIn summarily destroying one's 'Rolodex' an unlawful act, regardless of whether their boilerplate permits it? One could easily speculate that LinkedIn's terms are a one-sided contract with intolerable terms that exclusively benefit themselves to the harm of the other party, and a judge might well agree if presented such an argument. We'll never know unless people try, though :)

ps. Not particularly relevant, but it came up in research, so:

> Jaffe was asked by defense counsel, "Did you care how he obtained it?" and he answered, "I don't recall thinking that at the time, no sir." Defense counsel then asked, "... all you wanted was the information, and you did not care how it was obtained?" To which Jaffe responded, "Well, I certainly didn't expect him to murder anybody for it." TRM 161. Casper testified that when he handed Jaffe the rolodex file stolen from Wolstencroft's desk Jaffe "was rather elated."

— United States v. Payner, 434 F. Supp. 113 (N.D. Ohio 1977) footnote 34


They’re actually pretty diligent about finding relatively low-cost local lawyers to show up and provide some boilerplate.


Precisely :)


you can upload a csv of linkedin connections to a Clay table then use a data provider like FullEnrich to get emails and other profile info.

Could also use a tool like n8n instead of Clay or build your own system to read the csv and make api calls to enrichment service


What's Clay? Can't find the service you're referencing with a few quick searches


This is interesting! What would you recommend first?


It seems they don't care about false positives when looking for "automation" because their real goal is to prevent you from getting too much data regardless of the method. It happened to me on a different site once, my solution was to cancel my subscription and stop using it after their customer service wouldn't help me.


I think you are right. My intuition makes me think they are wanting to prevent you from getting too much of your own information where you can be independent. They want to keep you dependent.


You can delete a LI profile, create a new one, and ppl who are still relevant will find you again (and vice versa). True.

Your real colleague list is well under 100 ppl, stop adding mere acquaintances.


My real colleague list is well over 100ppl.


Interesting. As a lurker, LI tries to keep me logged in all the time/reduces friction to authenticating more so than most other platforms I use.


I think they want you to use their linkedin recruiter product instead


For the record, I totally agree that you should have this ability.

But they are likely orienting themselves with GDPR and similar laws around the world, under which data exports and portability only include your own data, and specifically exclude that of other "data subjects".

This is one of the few areas where I think that GDPR may be too strict.


Are you familiar with Cambridge Analytica? After a well-known 2018 scandal, we've decided as a society that we don't want social media platforms to allow this kind of large-scale extraction of other people's information. I'm sure you mean well, but you shouldn't build this list and Linkedin is right to prevent you from doing it.


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.


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.


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.


Are you going to reach out to 200 people? I imagine only 1-2 of them can actually significantly advance your career in any meaningful way. Wouldn't your time be better spent cultivating relationships with those 1-2 peole rather than collecting data on 200 people who you're realistically not going to see any return from?


You would hope so, but it doesn't seem so in today's job market. Have you seen how many applicants are on open SWE job postings these days?


Anecdotely, I’m in the interview pool at my mid size company. Our offer to application ratio is 0.4% with over 7000 applications. We are a fully remote company.

I have personally referred 6 people who I know are qualified. Only two got interviews and no offers.

Hell my offer to referral ratio was 50% at AWS. The job market really sucks right now


I can just put “Open To Work” as my status on LinkedIn and my entire network of former coworkers abs recruiters know I’m looking.




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