This summer, I received a professional recommendation from a former colleague on LinkedIn, so I logged in to check it out. While I was there, I decided to update my profile and tweak my account’s privacy settings. It took a little over an hour, but I was happy it was done.
A couple of days later, the LinkedIn advertisements I was exposed to did their work. I was convinced that I needed to become a subscriber to take advantage of LinkedIn’s new training platform called LinkedIn Learning. I signed up.
Soon after becoming a premium subscriber, I got a connection request from an Uber drive I gave my phone number to once. The problem is, I had just checked my privacy settings. He shouldn’t have been able to look up my LinkedIn profile by my phone number and my profile is private, so he shouldn’t have been able to use my name either.
As I was logging back in to LinkedIn, I remember thinking, “How could I have screwed that up?”
Turns out, I didn’t.
This is a two-part series about the information in your LinkedIn profile, why you might want to keep it private, and when those settings are ignored.
What’s in a LinkedIn Profile
Your LinkedIn profile has a great deal of information about you.
- Your picture
- Your full name
- City you live in
- What you do for a living
- Where you work or go to school
- What you studied
- What licenses you hold and who issued them
That information can be used to obtain more information about you.
- From your work history, how much you may have saved
- Roughly how much you earn
- When you’re likely to be at work or school
- Who might know more about you
- Whether you’re introverted or an extrovert
- When your home may be empty or car parked unguarded due to work travel
5 Reasons to Keep This Information Private
There are some pretty compelling reasons to lock down your LinkedIn profile. Remember, even if none of these conditions applies to you now, they might apply to you in the future, so it might be a good time to change some settings while you’re thinking about it.
1. If you’ve been the victim of identity theft, especially if it was a long time ago or was someone you know, it would be wise to assume that any personal information that was valid at the time (date of birth, social security number, mother’s maiden name, etc.) has been compromised. What that person may not know is where you live and work, now. So you might want to keep that information private.
2. If you’re being harassed or stalked by someone, you most certainly would want to keep information about where you live and work or go to school, under wraps. Anything that can be used to anticipate your whereabouts at a given time and learn your daily routine, might not be the best thing to post publicly on the internet.
3. People who have made a recent career change or taken a job where there has been a dramatic increase or decrease in responsibility might also choose to hide their work history from certain users for a while.
4. When you decide to start looking for another position, you might not want people anyone to know you’re looking. The cat could be out of the bag if you’ve started doing things that could indicate that you’re ready to make a move, like updating your LinkedIn profile, requesting and receiving professional recommendations, or changing your status to indicate that you’re open to hearing about other roles.
If you have a public profile, your changes are available to anyone with a LinkedIn account. If not, only your connections or the people in your network can see your changes. Still, don’t forget that unless you tell it not it, LinkedIn sends notifications to all of your connections, after each and every change you make.
5. If you’re Internet dating, you might not want to allow everyone you’ve talked to Online, to look up everything about you on LinkedIn. Depending on your settings, a public LinkedIn profile allows anyone to find your name, picture, education and work history, simply by searching for your name or the E-mail address or phone number associated with your LinkedIn account. That may not be ideal if you’ve used that E-mail address or phone number for anything except work related activities.
Who Can See Your Profile
Be default, LinkedIn allows anyone to see your entire profile. There are many privacy settings to consider.
When Your Privacy Settings are Ignored
Remember how I thought I made a mistake setting my privacy settings? It turns out, I hadn’t.
In the second part of this series, LinkedIn is Ignoring Your Privacy Settings and You Paid Them to Do It, I’ll discuss at least one instance where LinkedIn ignores your privacy settings and makes your profile publicly available to anyone with a LinkedIn account.
