Admittedly, it had been unused for quite a long time but, regardless, my LinkedIn profile had a few historical recommendations from people I actually knew and respected, so I hesitated before closing it.
The main reason I had for closing my LinkedIn account is to protest in some small way against the lawsuit that LinkedIn are pursuing against hiQ for scraping (automatically fetching and processing) public profiles of members.
I don’t know or care anything much about hiQ or their scraping antics, but LinkedIn pushing to criminalise accessing of public profiles, via a web server bound to a public TCP port, on a publicly visible computer is a dangerous step in the wrong direction. Continue reading