Chief Data Officer trajectory – Ethics of collecting workforce data from LinkedIn

Introduction

Embarking on the world of Chief Data Officer career, the series aim to explore their career trajectories through collection and analysis of LinkedIn profile data. But before we dive into the data collection process, let's address the burning questions around the legality and ethics of leveraging LinkedIn data. Are we allowed to collect profiles of LinkedIn members and share aggregated information with the public? Can we automate the process using data scraping tools? These questions are not just about curiosity; they lay the foundation for an ethical exploration of Chief Data Officer career trajectories.

Use of the member profile by another member

Avoiding the disclosure of personal identity information from LinkedIn to the public is an absolute imperative. The real question at hand is whether there are any constraints on sharing collective summaries or trends obtained by aggregating multiple profiles. The answer might be found in LinkedIn privacy policy. 

First, all LinkedIn users agree that their information can be copied and used by a third-party user.

When you share information on our Services, others can see, copy and use that information.

(2.5 Sharing , User Agreement)

With this statement in my mind, let us confirm on which purpose we may use those information. Here comes LinkedIn privacy policy to set the standard.  

We use your data to produce and share insights that do not identify you. For example, we may use your data to generate statistics about our members, their profession or industry, to calculate ad impressions served or clicked on, or to publish visitor demographics for a Service or create demographic workforce insights. 

(2.8 Insights That Do Not Identify You, Privacy Policy)

Legality of web scraping tool on LinkedIn profile data 

The second question is whether scraping tool can be used. I have been exploring web scraping tools for LinkedIn data for the last few years and found a few tools or services at some points of time. However, I have also been aware of prohibition of those tools at LinkedIn. The use of tool is strictly prohibited. 

From the above exploration of data use policy, it is likely to be okay to manually aggregate user profiles for my personal project to discover something about job market along with measures in privacy protection. I this experiment, I had to manually copy hundreds of profiles without any scraping tool.

Stay tuned for the next article, I will delve into the process of collecting profile data manually.