While I’m at it, I thought I’d take a look at what data linkedin.com has on me. It’s likely to be much less, since I rarely use the service and it’s been getting less and less as their emails with anything useful, plus new contacts, connect requests etc. always take me to the Google Play app store to install the linkedin app. That’s not happening, and I mostly just delete the emails and make a mental note to login via the website.
If you are interested in your linkedin data, you can get it via the linkedin.com Settings and then Privacy page. Here.
The email that arrived with a link said:
Here’s just the first part of the information we have archived for you, including things like connections, contacts, messages, and profile information.
It seems that will likely be the more interesting part of their archive. The first .zip file seems to mostly include only static data, most of which I’ve provided.
Interestingly, I joined linkedin on April 11th, 2006. I learned that from the registration .csv.
At least in the .zip file I got it had the following structure.
The media files were very limited, just two image files, and a PDF of a presentation that I posted directly to linkedin. This clearly isn’t all my data from linkedin, since it did not contain and links, articles, or images I’ve posted. It didn’t for example even include my profile and profile background pictures.
The spreadsheets were no more than comma seperated variables, but seemed fairly accurate. There is no clue how they came about these, I can only assume from businesses I “liked” etc. Here is the entire contents of the “Causes you care about” .csv
Civil Rights and Social Action Economic Empowerment Environment Human Rights Politics Science and Technology
Which seems about right. What I’m sure most people will be interested in are the contacts that linkedin has a mix of my personal contacts, and linkedin connections. For each “connection” it has firstname, surname, physical address, email address,current employment/employer, position, a date and time field(?) and finally a web address.
The physical address doesn’t seem to have come from my contacts, which I’m pretty sure I’ve not given linkedin access to via the app or a website link/upload. The majority of physical addresses are blank, even for people I have work/home addresses in my contacts.
So I think this is pretty much
Move on, nothing to see here!
When the 2nd .zip file arrives, I’ll add another post.