My assumption was that it was an intelligence platform first. Just like Skype, Microsoft decided to randomly buy it.

It amazing really. If you reached out to people and asked them for the information and graph that LinkedIn maintains, most employers would fire them.

ljm 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There's an entire cottage industry of linkedin scrapers that put a lot of effort into guessing your email address to enable cold outreach.

I'm ashamed to say I worked at one such place for several months.

Apollo is probably the most comprehensive source for this. It's creepy as fuck.

	▲	wolvoleo 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes I notice that too. I hide my last name now because at my company it's just firstname.lastname so easy to guess. It helps a lot but I still get a lot of sales goons. A lot of them follow up constantly too "hey what about that meeting invite I sent you why did you not attend"? My deleted email box is full of them (I instantly block them the minute I get an invite to anything from someone I don't know, and I wish Outlook had the ability to ban the entire origin domain too but it doesn't)

vaylian 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> My assumption was that it was an intelligence platform first.

What do you mean by "intelligence platform"?

	▲	estimator7292 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Spyware