mathbabe

I deleted my LinkedIn account a few weeks ago. I was increasingly getting spammed from solicitors on the site, and all sorts of weird people kept writing to me with bogus requests. Plus the content I saw when I bothered to log in were consistently hyped up crap about magic bullets using big data. I’d had enough, even though I was mildly wistful about the job I’d once landed through the network.

Well, I’m glad I quit, because I just learned that Microsoft has made an offer for LinkedIn for $26 billion. What this means is that all that social data, the professional contacts and so on that people have built up over years and years, is being handed over to a huge and powerful corporation that can change the privacy policy whenever they’d like, it seems. This is data that people protect as personally valuable individually; it is clearly quite valuable more generally.

And I have no personal vendetta against Microsoft, but clearly they have an agenda beyond simply connecting people and suggesting careers. At the very least, they want to expand their portfolio to social networking stuff so they’re not still living in the 1990’s. I also suspect they’ll submit the LinkedIn network to experiments to see how professionals respond to various marketing campaigns. Yuck.

I’m not saying that LinkedIn had motives that were perfectly aligned with its users, but I’m seeing this as a sever drop in alignment. I think it’s time to delete your LinkedIn account.