[superfrank]

For anyone who is asking what/who LinkedIn are protecting with this, it's not the users with the extensions installed, it's to protect the other users on the sites. I poked through some of the listed extensions and most are basically bots that you can turn on that will crawl through LinkedIn pages very quickly and either collect info (like email addresses) or send out messages to other LinkedIn users.

I found this video for one of the extensions that is a good example of what I'm talking about https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XvtuZjblCc (Warning: Loud music)

[whoisjuan]

In 2015 I wrote and publish and Chrome Extension for LinkedIn that calculated the age of a person and put that age next to the name in their LinkedIn profiles. It quickly went viral and showed up in several places including Product Hunt.

Someone from BuzzFeed reached out to me asking questions about it and then later that day wrote an article claiming that LinkedIn had asked me to take it down (until that point they hadn't). That night I received a cease and desist letter, so I took it down.

There were many valid reasons to ask for my extension to be removed, but I never got the impression that they were doing it to protect the users whose age was being augmented or at least it didn't feel that was their angle.

It felt more like "this data is ours, so back-off". Just to be clear, I'm not saying that they were rude in their communications or anything like that. But the C&D letter focused a lot on the techniques and uses of my extension and not so much on the "this violates user's privacy" or "this is not representing accurate data".

I just think that in general LinkedIn doesn't like people poking around and trying to scrape data in any way. In the end, that's their most valuable asset (users' data).

For anyone curious, I still have the website: http://www.whoisjuan.me/age-insight-linkedin/

[kiallmacinnes]

C&D letters are written by lawyers. They don't appeal to your empathy over the PII of other users, they state facts and appeal to the legal standing LinkedIn (or $company...) has over the data being used.

That said, I have no idea of the reasons LinkedIn sent you a C&D. It could well be any of the proposed options, or something else entirely. I'm just highlighting that the language in a C&D will rarely give any indication of intent, at least not "well written" ones anyway.

[logifail]

>> In the end, that's their most valuable asset (users' data)

Some might say it's their only valuable asset...

[peteretep]

> I poked through some of the listed extensions and most are basically bots that you can turn on that will crawl through LinkedIn pages very quickly and either collect info (like email addresses) or send out messages to other LinkedIn users.

I'm going to take the top ten from the list as an example:

daxtra -- Nothing like what you've described, plugin for a CRM

SalesloftProspector/SalesLoftCadence -- I don't see any crawling capability at all

discoverly -- Nothing like what you've described -- more like rapportive

Ecquire -- Nothing like what you've described, plugin for a CRM

Ebstabullhorn / EbstaSalesforce -- Nothing like what you've described -- plugins for Bullhorn and Salesforce CRMs only

ProspectHive -- apparently defunct, no idea

talentbin -- this is a social media aggregator

Entelo -- ATS plugin