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Closed my LinkedIn account · 2012-06-08 16:30 by Wladimir Palant

A bunch of posts on Planet Mozilla reminded me that there is still one social network that I am a member of. So it was time to reconsider whether having a LinkedIn account was worth it.

Pros:

I get to play the same “I have sooooo many contacts” game as everybody else.
I have a place to remind me of people who I worked with 10 years ago but who weren’t interesting enough to remember.
If I need to point somebody to my past experience I can simply give them a link (not that I’ve ever done that).
My friends get informed about my career advancements without having to talk to me.
There is a chance that I will get a great job offer because somebody sees my LinkedIn profile and is impressed (unfortunately, the chance to get contacted by a head hunter who simply contacts everybody is significantly higher).
LinkedIn shows somewhat more respect for my privacy than Facebook and most other social networks.

Cons:

My profile page keeps nagging me about my profile being “incomplete”. No, that page already has too much of my information and I’m not feeding it more.
I regularly get invitations to connect to some people who I don’t know. I used to answer, then I gave up and started ignoring them. But to ignore I have to log in and click “Ignore”, otherwise LinkedIn will continue sending me reminders. So I changed the settings to allow requests only from people knowing my email address. With my email address not exactly hard to find some are still coming through however.
LinkedIn just confirmed leaking at least 6.5 million user passwords. And they seriously used unsalted hashes. Now I use a unique password for each site but having my friends spammed through my LinkedIn account still wouldn’t be great.
Did I really say that they respect my privacy? At least their mobile app doesn’t and the official explanation doesn’t sound too plausible.

Having considered all this I decided to close my LinkedIn account. Has been fun eight years ago when I opened it, not any more. If you need to get in touch with me — there are still plenty of ways.

Tags: mozilla off-topic

Comment [3]

Pirlouy · 2012-06-08 19:52 · #

Selfish. It means you don’t and probably did never care about the life of your “friends”. :D
Kidding of course, but it’s a point to consider when closing an account.
Szero · 2012-06-09 22:03 · #

The truth is always eager to be hidden.

Reply from Wladimir Palant:

As it says above the comment form: “Please note that comments not related to this blog post will be removed.” And – if you wanted a reply you should have at least entered an email address (or simply sent me an email).
Anon · 2012-06-10 20:07 · #

Worse, their website is asking me to enter my email password on a non-SSL page.

Commenting is closed for this article.

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