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make changes on their profiles and then turn on the ac-
tivity broadcast, LinkedIn will provide feedback and
report any changes made during the time the option
was off? Clearly, the answer is negative.
Usually when a user is looking for a job, the pro-
file is updated but also recommendations are posted.
Regarding that, it is interesting to point out that an ac-
tivity update is generated not only when a user makes
a recommendation, but also when the user accepts a
recommendation made by other LinkedIn member.
Finally, although the control description does not
detail this aspect, joining a group (which gives tracks
about our interests) or updating your photo generates
an update although the control is turned off.
In our opinion, a possible improvement related to
this control could be to offer a greater granularity.
Thus, instead of activating or deactivating the gener-
ation of updates on the whole, users could select acti-
vate or deactivate the generation of updates associated
with a certain activities in particular.
Select who can see your Activity Feed. A user
can select who can see its Activity Feed section. The
values are: ‘Your connections’ (the default value),
‘Everyone’, ‘Your network’, and ‘Only you’.
Usually changing this control is associated to the
previous setting. If you don’t want to trigger updates
to prevent your contacts being alerted about changes
in your profile, you will not be interested in they can
access to your profile and know, at a glance, your ac-
tivities in the Activity feed.
Select what Others see when you’ve Viewed
their Profile. This control helps you to protect
your privacy when you are viewing other users pro-
files, selecting which information about your iden-
tity is shown. There are three options: ‘Your name
and headline’ (Recommended and default option),
‘Anonymous profile characteristics such as industry
and title’, and ‘You will be totally anonymous’.
As can be seen, the first option is fully open, while
the other two offer some degree of anonymity. The
chosen value not only determines what information
about us will get the owners of the profiles we have
visited, but also determines what information we will
get about the users who have visited our own profile.
If your LinkedIn account type is Basic and you
decide to hide either partially or totally your identity
(options 2 and 3), you will not get information about
who has viewed your profile. The ‘Who’s viewed
your profile’ box will indicate the number of users
who viewed your profile. But when you click on the
link, the detailed information is not available. How-
ever, if you do not hide your identity, Profile Stats is
available, offering the last 5 results of who’s viewed
your profile, the number of visits to your profile and
the number of times you’ve appeared in search results.
On the other hand, the third option could be mis-
leading. Although it is said ‘you will be totally anony-
mous’, the owner of the profile you have visited will
see that ‘Someone on LinkedIn’ has viewed his pro-
file, and this sentence is a link to a page called ‘One
of these people viewed your profile’, where just a re-
duced set of 10 profiles are listed.
If your LinkedIn account is Premium, Profile Stats
Pro is available independently of the selected degree
of anonymity. Profile Stats Pro shows the full list of
who’s viewed your profile (you won’t see additional
information about a profile viewer if they’ve chosen to
remain anonymous in their privacy settings), trends,
total profile visits, keywords used to find your profile,
number of times you’ve appeared in search results and
industries of people viewing your profile.
In this case, the anonymity offered by the last two
options is complete. Now, if option 3 is chosen (‘to-
tally anonymous’), the owner of the profile you have
visited will see that ‘LinkedIn Member’ has viewed
his profile, but now this sentence can not be clicked.
Select who Can See your Connections. Using
this control, user can choose to show or not his en-
tire list of connections. There are two options: ‘your
connections’ (the default value), and ‘only you’.
As advertised by a note, it is important to point out
that although ‘Only you’ option is selected, people
will always be able to see your shared connections.
On the other hand, users could think that choosing
the ‘only you’ option, their list of connections will be
safe. However, as described in (Staddon, 2009), that
is not completely true. Using the LinkedIn Search en-
gine, a user can discover, if not all, a large part of the
list of connections of another user whose configura-
tion aims to keep the list hidden. The procedure is
briefly described below.
Consider that user A (the attacker) is a connection
of user B (the target). B has set this privacy control
to ‘only you’. However, using the profile attributes
configured by B, A will be able to discover part of
B’s contacts. For that, A must make note of the main
attributes corresponding to the ‘current’, ‘previous’
and ‘education’ fields in user B profile. Next, A will
use each of these attributes in the keyword field in
the LinkedIn search tool. Then, for any returned user
labeled ‘2nd’, user A must click on the ‘shared con-
nections’ link and check if B is listened there. If B
is found, that user is a contact of B. This data mining
process generates an incomplete list of B’s contacts,
which can be widen if the process is repeated using
the attributes of the discovered contacts.
The cost of this procedure results in a repetitive
task of introducing attributes and checking, one by
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