I am in the process of deleting my presence on the last social networking website I have left, LinkedIn. This has been triggered by their latest breach 1.
I also noticed my LinkedIn data, including contact information, publicly available on data brokers such as Apollo.io. Apollo too was breached in 2018, when they exposed their database unprotected on the open web.
The most value I’ve ever derived from LinkedIn has been finding out when old friends are in town for a conference or for work. Even that becomes trickier as the content gets more and more dominated by companies posting, rather than friends. In any case, I’m sure we can work out better ways of achieving the same result without making data brokers and hackers richer in the process.
I have dealt with shady businesses long enough to know that my “delete” request will not cause much to be deleted. So I’m slowly removing data from my profile, with the actual deletion about a month from now. If you’re looking for OSINT on me, try this blog. ;)
And if you’re a real person and you want to get in touch, do! underscore AT gclv DOT es, or find me anywhere listed here.
- Although LinkedIn prefers to call it not-a-breach, which makes the optics even worse: that this much information has been leaked is apparently a feature. But really, though, failing to protect user data from scraping is a security breach. ↩︎