A bunch of posts on Planet Mozilla reminded me that there is still one social network that I am a member of. So it was time to reconsider whether having a LinkedIn account was worth it.
Pros:
- I get to play the same “I have sooooo many contacts” game as everybody else.
- I have a place to remind me of people who I worked with 10 years ago but who weren’t interesting enough to remember.
- If I need to point somebody to my past experience I can simply give them a link (not that I’ve ever done that).
- My friends get informed about my career advancements without having to talk to me.
- There is a chance that I will get a great job offer because somebody sees my LinkedIn profile and is impressed (unfortunately, the chance to get contacted by a head hunter who simply contacts everybody is significantly higher).
- LinkedIn shows somewhat more respect for my privacy than Facebook and most other social networks.
Cons:
- My profile page keeps nagging me about my profile being “incomplete”. No, that page already has too much of my information and I’m not feeding it more.
- I regularly get invitations to connect to some people who I don’t know. I used to answer, then I gave up and started ignoring them. But to ignore I have to log in and click “Ignore”, otherwise LinkedIn will continue sending me reminders. So I changed the settings to allow requests only from people knowing my email address. With my email address not exactly hard to find some are still coming through however.
- LinkedIn just confirmed leaking at least 6.5 million user passwords. And they seriously used unsalted hashes. Now I use a unique password for each site but having my friends spammed through my LinkedIn account still wouldn’t be great.
- Did I really say that they respect my privacy? At least their mobile app doesn’t and the official explanation doesn’t sound too plausible.
Having considered all this I decided to close my LinkedIn account. Has been fun eight years ago when I opened it, not any more. If you need to get in touch with me — there are still plenty of ways.
Comments
Selfish. It means you don’t and probably did never care about the life of your “friends”. :D
Kidding of course, but it’s a point to consider when closing an account.
The truth is always eager to be hidden.
As it says above the comment form: “Please note that comments not related to this blog post will be removed.” And – if you wanted a reply you should have at least entered an email address (or simply sent me an email).
Worse, their website is asking me to enter my email password on a non-SSL page.