[baxtr]

Well, another good reason for LinkedIn to thi is to protect their revenues. I heard of headhunters who don’t want to pay their (high) monthly subscription fees and instead “hack” their system. I guess “hacking” includes using these extensions.

[derefr]

Right. I once worked for a company that was trying to perform a business “matchmaking” service. We considered, as part of the implementation possibility-space, scraping people’s connections from LinkedIn in order to enhance our results. But LinkedIn has many advanced anti-scraping heuristics in their backend; this is just one of many. So we scrapped that option (before ever getting around to considering the ethics of it.)