HN Explorer

LinkedIn Prevents You from Deplatforming

45 points by jeffkumar ↗ HN
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?

11 comments

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FistfulOfHaws
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).

Grimblewald
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.
add-sub-mul-div
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.
CodingJeebus
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.
altairprime
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.)
connor11528
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

snihalani
I think they want you to use their linkedin recruiter product instead
SpicyLemonZest
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.
bitfilped
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?
nacozarina
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.

Quarondeau
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.