LinkedIn may or Maybe not a perfect replacement for Twitter, but one thing’s for sure: it’s a very strange place. It’s strange that staying active on a platform is a basic requirement for finding a job for today’s knowledge workers. Additionally, this is a place where a lot of people spend their time pretending they are interesting, interesting people by reacting and replying to posts from recruiters and hiring managers. And then there were the LinkedIn influencers, all of whom sounded like ChatGPT long before ChatGPT existed.
But perhaps the strangest thing about LinkedIn is how transparent its surveillance capabilities are. While other social networks try to obfuscate how much they track your activity, LinkedIn invites you to participate in the collection of user behavioral data every step of the way.This is a social network that will periodically send you notifications about Who viewed your profile.
By default, every time you view someone’s LinkedIn profile while logged in, they will receive a notification that you viewed it. I can understand why a job seeker might want this information—if a potential employer is evaluating you, you might want to follow up—but I can also see why this would be absolutely crazy for a job seeker to know. What you should do, email someone and say, “I noticed you looked at my LinkedIn profile. Do you like what you see?” (Just the thought of doing this literally kills me. You are reading the words of a real ghost.)
Imagine how weird it would be if every time you scrolled through someone’s Instagram grid to see their old photos, they got a notification telling them you’d finished the action. On LinkedIn, people with paid subscriptions have more complete access to data about who is peeking; most people can only see the last few viewers, but paid users can get everyone who has viewed their profile in the past year Complete list of people.
I find this radical transparency a bit disturbing. The good news is that you can turn off this notification feature – it’s just a bit hidden. Here’s how to find it.
Change your LinkedIn viewing options
Go to LinkedIn.Click your profile picture in the upper right corner of your browser window, then click Settings and privacy. (In the LinkedIn mobile app, your profile photo appears in the upper left corner; click it to access Settings and follow the same instructions below.)
Click in the left sidebar visibility then click Profile viewing options.
Here you can choose from three options: “Your name and title,” “Private profile features,” and “Private mode.”
The default option, “Your Name and Identity,” notifies everyone you visit on your profile page that you have done so, and shows them your photo and job description along with a link to your profile page. They’ll then click on a link to send you a notification that they’ve done so, and the pattern will repeat until the sun expands and engulfs the Earth. You can prevent this from happening by changing your settings.
The second option, “Private Profile Features,” simply shows other users a summary of your occupation and place of residence when you view their profiles. This makes you sound mysterious, but mostly just annoys everyone due to lack of specificity. A third, better option is Private Mode, which allows you to view anyone’s profile page in relative privacy.
Note that this choice to retain sharing permissions works both ways: Choosing anything other than the default choice of sharing your identity will prevent you from seeing when others view your profile. For me, this is a win because it means I get fewer LinkedIn notifications. But you might want to keep this in mind if you find it useful to know who is viewing your profile.