[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...