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Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

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Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#31
post #20
post #17

They seem hellbent on having a rotten reputation. I do not know a single person who likes it other than recruiters (who all tell me they're upset about people not replying to their out-of-the-blue messages). Every developer I know either simply dislikes the LinkedIn experience, or knows about the company's shitty behaviour and despises the company (to the point of deleting their profile or not signing up). Surely thi…

I have the opposite experience. I don’t get any messages from recruiters after having set the appropriate preferences. And I use LinkedIn to connect to relevant people in my field.

Consider yourself lucky.

I get hundreds per year.

Maybe 1 in 50 are decently relevant.

Many are mass spams. A good amount will be in tech I have no interest in, haven't worked in in over a decade, or have never worked in. It's clear the messages are sent without ever actually reading your profile or even job titles.

I wish there were a way to control only the handcrafted / non-spam messages reaching my inbox.

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#32
post #10

Are you confident that LinkedIn itself is doing that, rather than some recruiter working for or targeting that different company? Or a recruitment SaaS that recruiter is using? (Recruitment seems to be numbers game for a lot of people. And I've noticed a few questionable integrations and duct-tape workflows going on around LinkedIn. I wouldn't be surprised if the phenomenon you noticed was an accident of one of those…

What's the difference? The end product is the same - OP's privacy is still undermined

How is privacy undermined?

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#33

Scraping for me, but not for thee. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/link...

LinkedIn may be less hypocritical than it first appears: February 2022: LinkedIn sue Mantheos. April 18, 2022: TechCrunch runs an article [0] stating that a U.S. appellate court affirms the legality of scraping publicly available data. So IIUC, LinkedIn was consistently playing to the apparent law. EDIT: oops, forgot the link! [0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

That gives rise to a decent conspiracy theory: LI sued to pave the road for LI themselves to scrape en masse.

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#34
post #23

How does this play with copyright infringement? If I advertise a job on my own website, and someone copies that verbatim and reposts it, isn't it a clear case of copyright infringement? (or am I missing something....)

It's a referral, same as Google search. Anybody interested clicks through to the original site, which is what the original site wants.

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#35
Preface: I hate LinkedIn

Do we know that in fact LinkedIn is scraping? Could it be that the LinkedIn data science team is erroneously matching company names with job titles that are added to its website? E.g., someone from YMCombinator posts a page to LinkedIn and puts the application link to angel.co. Then LinkedIn mistakenly sees YMCombinator as YCombinator and adds the logo (no scraping involved).

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#36

This is the reason why I never click the hyperlinks on LinkedIn (or anywhere else, including my email, also including hyperlinks allowing me to unsubscribe from services etc.) while in my main browser. Always sending them to incognito browser. If it requires me to be logged in then I just shrug my shoulders and not view it again. That's because I (as somebody who is not an expert in security) can't tell what those lo…

If i understand your description of what you do correctly, then clicking the email links in incognito mode does not help you in any way. The long weird url is almost always a tracking link unique to the specific email that you received. Clicking it verifies that you received and read the email sent you your email adress, no matter where you click it

The long weird URL lets you unsubscribe without having to log in

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#37

Scraping for me, but not for thee. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/link...

LinkedIn may be less hypocritical than it first appears: February 2022: LinkedIn sue Mantheos. April 18, 2022: TechCrunch runs an article [0] stating that a U.S. appellate court affirms the legality of scraping publicly available data. So IIUC, LinkedIn was consistently playing to the apparent law. EDIT: oops, forgot the link! [0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

Citation for TechCrunch article missing.

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#38
post #29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like it should be easy to replace LinkedIn but no one seems to do it. I've looked at Xing and a few others. I loved the premise of LinkedIn but you can't forward messages any more.

> it should be easy to replace Often network effects dominate this sort of thing, so that's probably not true.

You're right about the network effect.

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#39

Scraping for me, but not for thee. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/link...

LinkedIn may be less hypocritical than it first appears: February 2022: LinkedIn sue Mantheos. April 18, 2022: TechCrunch runs an article [0] stating that a U.S. appellate court affirms the legality of scraping publicly available data. So IIUC, LinkedIn was consistently playing to the apparent law. EDIT: oops, forgot the link! [0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

Re: Tell HN: LinkedIn is automatically importing job postings into company profiles

#40
post #23

How does this play with copyright infringement? If I advertise a job on my own website, and someone copies that verbatim and reposts it, isn't it a clear case of copyright infringement? (or am I missing something....)

Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms (April 2022) [1]:

> Using a “gate-up, gate-down” analogy, the Supreme Court said that when a computer or website’s gates are up — and therefore information is publicly accessible — no authorization is required.

> The Ninth Circuit, in referencing the Supreme Court’s “gate-up, gate-down” analogy, ruled that “the concept of ‘without authorization’ does not apply to public websites.”

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/

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