20 ms·

Creepy visitor tracking using Linkedin

89 points by aatteka 12y ago

campbellsoup 12y ago
Very interesting idea. Where do the authToken and authType come from though? Isn't it sufficient to have the classic LinkedIn profile URI [/profile/view?id=98261032]?
- aatteka 12y ago
  It doesn't work without a token (apparently it did some time ago http://blog.makensi.es/post/3679713636/fingerprinting-your-visitors-using-social-networks http://blog.makensi.es/post/3679713636/fingerprinting-your-v... ) You can get a token from Linkedin itself.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
If you don't have a linkedin account I highly recommend the experience of setting one up. It is horrible. You are upsold at every step of the process. Reminded at every step that you should import your contacts and just forced to use horrible defaults every step of the way. After you have an account you'd think the sane defaults would be to not spam you with every little thing that happens on the site. Nope, you manually have to turn all the spam off in at least 5 different places. Once you're done with the spam you now also have to disable all the nonsense default sharing settings in another 5 different places. The whole thing is just a usability nightmare and an example of what dark patterns look like in practice. I don't know about you but if there was some other network for professionals to showcase profiles I would jump on that immediately. Linkedin is so horrible that if you make something and market it as 'Not Linkedin' you'll have the first few years of growth handed to you for free.
- onedev 12y ago
  Holy hell, their Captcha is one of the most aggressive I have ever seen on any website. It's literally impossible to solve and on top of that it's broken half the time.
- peteretep 12y ago
  > I don't know about you but if there was some other > network for professionals to showcase profiles I would > jump on that immediately XING?
  - dkarapetyan 12y ago
    Neat. Why is it limited to Germany?
    - Mithaldu 12y ago
      Full disclosure: I'm a german web developer. Xing is made by a Perl company in Germany, specifically Hamburg. Having had some experience with other web-related companies, most german software is written with german content first, and little thought spent on localization, since serving an audience outside of germany is risky in that it means a lot of the company (support, etc.) has to be duplicated first, and it might end up having little draw. On the flipside, most Perl web frameworks are build with only one language in mind, English. Adding localization is extremely easy if you start out with it in mind, and i've actually been working on tools to ease that process, but after the fact it's a massive investment. Due to all these factors the cost is simply too high for most german companies to even try.
      - czottmann 12y ago
        AFAIK, it's actually a Rails shop these days. (I know people who work there.)
    - peteretep 12y ago
      > Neat. Why is it limited to Germany? It's ... not?
  - hrvbr 12y ago
    Viadeo is more popular in France.
    - ldng 12y ago
- click170 12y ago
  I agree with everything except for actually advising people to sign up. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies. Or the friends of my enemies.
- Gmo 12y ago
  As mentioned elsewhere, there is Viadeo.
- logicallee 12y ago
  >I don't know about you but if there was some other network for professionals to showcase profiles I would jump on that immediately. What features would make this a killer? We are working on something that is in this general space and have a few ideas, including the ideas that started the project, but I'm curious what other pain points you can enumerate. What would be a perfect linkedin substitute for you?
  - peteretep 12y ago
    Coming at it from a slightly different angle (this is my sector)... The big problem with LinkedIn is that it's a Jobseeker Database masquerading as a social network. They make their money by selling you to recruiters. That's the central cause of almost all the behaviour people don't like. The second part of that is that the social network part - the stickiness angle - really isn't a natural part, which is why it's so irritating that it wants to notify you that someone you worked with once published an article. I'm afraid I don't know the killer features or the solution, but that's the root issue.
  - dkarapetyan 12y ago
    Happy to know people are working on substitutes. The perfect replacement for me would be a combination of Forrst and meetup. What I mean by that is that it should be some place where I can showcase my skills and get involved with like-minded individuals in the same or adjacent professions. As someone already mentioned linkedin is really just a recruiter database and the social aspects are completely forced.
me_bx 12y ago
The article shows that the number of visits leaks to linkedIn. Any idea whether the identities of visitor can be know from the "Who viewed your profile" page?
- johansch 12y ago
  That's just a matter of bribing linkedin. "With Premium, you can see who's viewed your profile over the last 90 days, not just the last 5 viewers free members see."
Mithaldu 12y ago
I'm not quite sure how valid such a complaint is, coming from a page that tracks via: - Google Analytics - Google+ - Twitter - whatever else my URL blocker preemptively neutered Linkedin seems to do the same as GA, and only differs from G+ and Twitter in that it shows the hit counts.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Most other alternatives does not show you the names, resume and professional network of a substantial percentage of everyone who have visited your site.
steven2012 12y ago
I recently got access to a LinkedIn recruiter-level account, and it's frightening how much information recruiters have about someone. Not only can they look at anyone's linkedin profile, there are additional services (not affiliated with linkedin... I think) that keep a copy of everyone's linkedin profile, even if you delete it. They cross reference your linkedin profile with meetup, facebook, etc, to get an ultimate cyberstalking profile about almost anyone they want. I think it was called talentbin.com, but there are other sites as well. Very, very creepy and this isn't even the NSA we're talking about, this is a recruiter.
- coldpie 12y ago
  Reminder that most or all of that information was volunteered by the stalkee. If the information isn't put on the web in the first place, it can't be found. Be careful with what you make public, folks. If you put it on the web, it is as good as public. (Obviously this doesn't apply for things like shopping profiles, but probably that's not what you were talking about.)
- dhotson 12y ago
  I found it a little bit ironic that one of the companies protesting NSA surveillance and collection of user data.. was LinkedIn. https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    Hardly ironic. Companies that utilize customer data are the most at risk from reactions to government surveillance. Many people are much, much less concerned with a company having their data (which they will use to show you more effective advertising - i.e. things you actually want) than with the government having their data - which they are using in the explicitly adversarial process of determining if you are a criminal. When the government forces Facebook, Google and LinkedIn to be complicit in their compromise of user data, people can no longer trust these companies to safeguard it, and it hurts the companies' bottom lines.
- mooreds 12y ago
ExpiredLink 12y ago
> So a little advice - if you prefer privacy don't forget to sign out of your Linkedin account before browsing the Web. ... and, of course, also sign out of Google and any other online service you are logged in!
- grimman 12y ago
  It's usually around this time I plug Self Destructing Cookies (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct... ); it simply nukes any cookies that aren't whitelisted. Edit: For Firefox
  - gurkendoktor 12y ago
    I'm using this tool from the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cookie/id415585910?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cookie/id415585910?mt=12 The UI is pretty bad, but it seems to be doing its job.
  - ExpiredLink 12y ago
    > it simply nukes any cookies that aren't whitelisted. Probably not what you want in case of e.g. Google.
    - grimman 12y ago
      I don't see why it would be any different in the case of Google; but I don't personally use the Google services to any greater extent these days, so perhaps I'm just not feeling the ramifications ordinary users would.
- coldpie 12y ago
  I actually use Firefox's private browsing feature for browsing untrusted websites. That combined with NoScript should keep me quite (but obviously not entirely) anonymous.
weavie 12y ago
With LinkedIn being as bad as people say, why do people sign up to it? Is there really no alternative? What is it that makes it compulsory to use? I have a very out of date profile, but rarely use it. For some reason I don't seem to get spammed. I don't see any use for it, so I don't visit.
- seren 12y ago
  Because of the network effect. It is a lazy way to keep up a list of contacts you have worked with, that will automatically update itself when people move. I don't really plan to contact everyone in the future, but I sometimes look up what people are up to. It is good way to discover companies in your area of expertise.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  It is completely useless in the sense that you can do the same thing with a simple blog and json file for your resume. The reason people use it is because it is an extremely simple way to showcase a professional profile in a place where every recruiter and their grandma knows is full of professional profiles. It would be very easy to build an alternative. The hard part would be amassing the critical mass of recruiters. For a while Forrst was on the right track but it no longer exists.
  - weavie 12y ago
    Interesting. So do people get head hunted on Linked In? I always ignore any requests from recruiters. Maybe I should take my profile more seriously?
    - dkarapetyan 12y ago
      Yup, all the time.
    - jgalt212 12y ago
      I know of at least one blue chip firm that no longer pays headhunters, and now does all their recruiting via LinkedIn using the paid Recruiter features.
vidarh 12y ago
On one hand there are caveats with this, and on the other hand more opportunities. Here's one caveat that doubles as a benefit to someone doing this (assuming you want people to find your profile): When looking at a profile, LinkedIn shows you lists of other profiles people who have looked at this profile looks at. You should presumably show up there far more often if your profile gets seen far more often. As a result your numbers will be skewed - you won't be able to tell who visited your website vs. came to your profile because it's suddenly showing up all over LinkedIn. On other hand, that means actual human views of your profile is likely to go up substantially too.
ruben_varnish 12y ago
Well, same goes for sites using elements from Twitter, Facebook, Google (think of their JS CDN)... For those sites you can use https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/
- seba_dos1 12y ago
  No. It's not about how Twitter, Facebook and Google can track users. It's about how you can use LinkedIn to track users.
300bps 12y ago
The worst part is that LinkedIn will sell this information to anyone. There are several sites out there that allow you to put a Javascript snippet onto your page and thereby know the real names and any other details LinkedIn has for any "anonymous" website visitor to your site. One of my side programming jobs is a company that does Internet marketing and he had me put the snippet on all of his sites - it literally shocked me when I saw people's real names coming through the stats, all because they remained logged in to LinkedIn. I generally only log in to LinkedIn with Internet Explorer now. It's the only site that I use Internet Explorer for.
- nolite 12y ago
  mind sharing which service does this?
  - 300bps 12y ago
    Visistat
emmelaich 12y ago
I get an email to invite me to connect to someone every time (only three times so far) I merely visit their LinkedIn profile. I thought at first they had some premium feature but on second thoughts it was probably something like this. I never have myself logged in to LinkedIn at the same time. Backstory: An acquaintance of mine requested a connection soon after I met them for the first time. I was a little wary so didn't accept before speaking to them. I found out later that it was a fake profile copied from his real one and they were a victim of identity theft.

89 points by aatteka 12y ago

Very interesting idea. Where do the authToken and authType come from though? Isn't it sufficient to have the classic LinkedIn profile URI [/profile/view?id=98261032]?

aatteka 12y ago
It doesn't work without a token (apparently it did some time ago http://blog.makensi.es/post/3679713636/fingerprinting-your-visitors-using-social-networks http://blog.makensi.es/post/3679713636/fingerprinting-your-v... ) You can get a token from Linkedin itself.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

If you don't have a linkedin account I highly recommend the experience of setting one up. It is horrible. You are upsold at every step of the process. Reminded at every step that you should import your contacts and just forced to use horrible defaults every step of the way. After you have an account you'd think the sane defaults would be to not spam you with every little thing that happens on the site. Nope, you manually have to turn all the spam off in at least 5 different places. Once you're done with the spam you now also have to disable all the nonsense default sharing settings in another 5 different places. The whole thing is just a usability nightmare and an example of what dark patterns look like in practice. I don't know about you but if there was some other network for professionals to showcase profiles I would jump on that immediately. Linkedin is so horrible that if you make something and market it as 'Not Linkedin' you'll have the first few years of growth handed to you for free.

onedev 12y ago
Holy hell, their Captcha is one of the most aggressive I have ever seen on any website. It's literally impossible to solve and on top of that it's broken half the time.
peteretep 12y ago
> I don't know about you but if there was some other > network for professionals to showcase profiles I would > jump on that immediately XING?
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Neat. Why is it limited to Germany?
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    Full disclosure: I'm a german web developer. Xing is made by a Perl company in Germany, specifically Hamburg. Having had some experience with other web-related companies, most german software is written with german content first, and little thought spent on localization, since serving an audience outside of germany is risky in that it means a lot of the company (support, etc.) has to be duplicated first, and it might end up having little draw. On the flipside, most Perl web frameworks are build with only one language in mind, English. Adding localization is extremely easy if you start out with it in mind, and i've actually been working on tools to ease that process, but after the fact it's a massive investment. Due to all these factors the cost is simply too high for most german companies to even try.
    - czottmann 12y ago
      AFAIK, it's actually a Rails shop these days. (I know people who work there.)
  - peteretep 12y ago
    > Neat. Why is it limited to Germany? It's ... not?
- hrvbr 12y ago
  Viadeo is more popular in France.
  - ldng 12y ago
click170 12y ago
I agree with everything except for actually advising people to sign up. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies. Or the friends of my enemies.
Gmo 12y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, there is Viadeo.
logicallee 12y ago
>I don't know about you but if there was some other network for professionals to showcase profiles I would jump on that immediately. What features would make this a killer? We are working on something that is in this general space and have a few ideas, including the ideas that started the project, but I'm curious what other pain points you can enumerate. What would be a perfect linkedin substitute for you?
- peteretep 12y ago
  Coming at it from a slightly different angle (this is my sector)... The big problem with LinkedIn is that it's a Jobseeker Database masquerading as a social network. They make their money by selling you to recruiters. That's the central cause of almost all the behaviour people don't like. The second part of that is that the social network part - the stickiness angle - really isn't a natural part, which is why it's so irritating that it wants to notify you that someone you worked with once published an article. I'm afraid I don't know the killer features or the solution, but that's the root issue.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Happy to know people are working on substitutes. The perfect replacement for me would be a combination of Forrst and meetup. What I mean by that is that it should be some place where I can showcase my skills and get involved with like-minded individuals in the same or adjacent professions. As someone already mentioned linkedin is really just a recruiter database and the social aspects are completely forced.

me_bx 12y ago

The article shows that the number of visits leaks to linkedIn. Any idea whether the identities of visitor can be know from the "Who viewed your profile" page?

johansch 12y ago
That's just a matter of bribing linkedin. "With Premium, you can see who's viewed your profile over the last 90 days, not just the last 5 viewers free members see."

Mithaldu 12y ago

I'm not quite sure how valid such a complaint is, coming from a page that tracks via: - Google Analytics - Google+ - Twitter - whatever else my URL blocker preemptively neutered Linkedin seems to do the same as GA, and only differs from G+ and Twitter in that it shows the hit counts.

vidarh 12y ago
Most other alternatives does not show you the names, resume and professional network of a substantial percentage of everyone who have visited your site.

steven2012 12y ago

I recently got access to a LinkedIn recruiter-level account, and it's frightening how much information recruiters have about someone. Not only can they look at anyone's linkedin profile, there are additional services (not affiliated with linkedin... I think) that keep a copy of everyone's linkedin profile, even if you delete it. They cross reference your linkedin profile with meetup, facebook, etc, to get an ultimate cyberstalking profile about almost anyone they want. I think it was called talentbin.com, but there are other sites as well. Very, very creepy and this isn't even the NSA we're talking about, this is a recruiter.

coldpie 12y ago
Reminder that most or all of that information was volunteered by the stalkee. If the information isn't put on the web in the first place, it can't be found. Be careful with what you make public, folks. If you put it on the web, it is as good as public. (Obviously this doesn't apply for things like shopping profiles, but probably that's not what you were talking about.)
dhotson 12y ago
I found it a little bit ironic that one of the companies protesting NSA surveillance and collection of user data.. was LinkedIn. https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/
- x1798DE 12y ago
  Hardly ironic. Companies that utilize customer data are the most at risk from reactions to government surveillance. Many people are much, much less concerned with a company having their data (which they will use to show you more effective advertising - i.e. things you actually want) than with the government having their data - which they are using in the explicitly adversarial process of determining if you are a criminal. When the government forces Facebook, Google and LinkedIn to be complicit in their compromise of user data, people can no longer trust these companies to safeguard it, and it hurts the companies' bottom lines.
mooreds 12y ago

ExpiredLink 12y ago

> So a little advice - if you prefer privacy don't forget to sign out of your Linkedin account before browsing the Web. ... and, of course, also sign out of Google and any other online service you are logged in!

grimman 12y ago
It's usually around this time I plug Self Destructing Cookies (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destructing-cookies/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct... ); it simply nukes any cookies that aren't whitelisted. Edit: For Firefox
- gurkendoktor 12y ago
  I'm using this tool from the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cookie/id415585910?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cookie/id415585910?mt=12 The UI is pretty bad, but it seems to be doing its job.
- ExpiredLink 12y ago
  > it simply nukes any cookies that aren't whitelisted. Probably not what you want in case of e.g. Google.
  - grimman 12y ago
    I don't see why it would be any different in the case of Google; but I don't personally use the Google services to any greater extent these days, so perhaps I'm just not feeling the ramifications ordinary users would.
coldpie 12y ago
I actually use Firefox's private browsing feature for browsing untrusted websites. That combined with NoScript should keep me quite (but obviously not entirely) anonymous.

weavie 12y ago

With LinkedIn being as bad as people say, why do people sign up to it? Is there really no alternative? What is it that makes it compulsory to use? I have a very out of date profile, but rarely use it. For some reason I don't seem to get spammed. I don't see any use for it, so I don't visit.

seren 12y ago
Because of the network effect. It is a lazy way to keep up a list of contacts you have worked with, that will automatically update itself when people move. I don't really plan to contact everyone in the future, but I sometimes look up what people are up to. It is good way to discover companies in your area of expertise.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
It is completely useless in the sense that you can do the same thing with a simple blog and json file for your resume. The reason people use it is because it is an extremely simple way to showcase a professional profile in a place where every recruiter and their grandma knows is full of professional profiles. It would be very easy to build an alternative. The hard part would be amassing the critical mass of recruiters. For a while Forrst was on the right track but it no longer exists.
- weavie 12y ago
  Interesting. So do people get head hunted on Linked In? I always ignore any requests from recruiters. Maybe I should take my profile more seriously?
  - dkarapetyan 12y ago
    Yup, all the time.
  - jgalt212 12y ago
    I know of at least one blue chip firm that no longer pays headhunters, and now does all their recruiting via LinkedIn using the paid Recruiter features.

vidarh 12y ago

On one hand there are caveats with this, and on the other hand more opportunities. Here's one caveat that doubles as a benefit to someone doing this (assuming you want people to find your profile): When looking at a profile, LinkedIn shows you lists of other profiles people who have looked at this profile looks at. You should presumably show up there far more often if your profile gets seen far more often. As a result your numbers will be skewed - you won't be able to tell who visited your website vs. came to your profile because it's suddenly showing up all over LinkedIn. On other hand, that means actual human views of your profile is likely to go up substantially too.

ruben_varnish 12y ago

Well, same goes for sites using elements from Twitter, Facebook, Google (think of their JS CDN)... For those sites you can use https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/

seba_dos1 12y ago
No. It's not about how Twitter, Facebook and Google can track users. It's about how you can use LinkedIn to track users.

300bps 12y ago

The worst part is that LinkedIn will sell this information to anyone. There are several sites out there that allow you to put a Javascript snippet onto your page and thereby know the real names and any other details LinkedIn has for any "anonymous" website visitor to your site. One of my side programming jobs is a company that does Internet marketing and he had me put the snippet on all of his sites - it literally shocked me when I saw people's real names coming through the stats, all because they remained logged in to LinkedIn. I generally only log in to LinkedIn with Internet Explorer now. It's the only site that I use Internet Explorer for.

nolite 12y ago
mind sharing which service does this?
- 300bps 12y ago
  Visistat

emmelaich 12y ago

I get an email to invite me to connect to someone every time (only three times so far) I merely visit their LinkedIn profile. I thought at first they had some premium feature but on second thoughts it was probably something like this. I never have myself logged in to LinkedIn at the same time. Backstory: An acquaintance of mine requested a connection soon after I met them for the first time. I was a little wary so didn't accept before speaking to them. I found out later that it was a fake profile copied from his real one and they were a victim of identity theft.