Many regard LinkedIn as the “safe” social network–there are no games that jeopardize your privacy, you aren’t posting incriminating photos of last weekend’s Halloween party and you’re not TKTKTKTK. But that’s no reason to ignore the privacy and account settings that LinkedIn has in place.
You can find your list of settings by clicking on your name on the top right of the screen and choosing Settings. This list includes profile settings, e-mail notifications, home page settings, personal information, privacy settings and more.
How much of your profile have you made public? Are all of your tweets being pushed to LinkedIn? Can others see that you’ve viewed their profile? If you’re unsure of these answers, take a look at the following five privacy settings and adjust them appropriately.
If your intent is transparency, the full view is recommended. However if you’re not looking to disclose all of your information, go to the Profiles Settings section and update by unchecking the profile features that you don’t want displayed publicly. You can find this setting under the Profile Settings section.
The Public Profile settings section also has a feature similar to Facebook’s where you can make changes and view your public profile as others will see it.
Another feature on this settings page: customized buttons. If you’re looking to add a button to your blog or website to promote your LinkedIn profile, this page will give you the code for several different ones.
You can find this setting under Profile Settings. Member Feed Visibility gives you four settings to choose from. Your LinkedIn actions can be visible to everyone, only those people in your network, only your direct connections or nobody (which means your member feed won’t be displayed). If you prefer that your LinkedIn actions are private, choose one of the latter two settings.
To find out whether or not you are posting all of your Tweets to LinkedIn, choose Twitter Settings under the Profile Settings section. Here you can add or remove a Twitter account, choose whether or not you want to display your Twitter account on your LinkedIn profile and decide whether or not you want to share all your tweets or only the tweets that contain the #in hashtag. Here, you can also adjust how you want your tweets to appear (i.e. with a picture, title page and short description).
Clicking on this link will bring you to a page that displays vague statistics related to who has viewed your profile, such as “Someone at XYZ company,” “Someone in the technology/new media function in the Greater Boston Area” and “Vice President at XYZ company.”
Visit the Profile Views setting, found under the Privacy Settings section, if you want to adjust how you appear to others when you visit their profile.
You have three options: You can have your name and headline included (which also will display your picture and current title); you can be displayed anonymously with only profile characteristics such as your industry and title; or you can be invisible to the users you have viewed.
Since then, you’ve probably tried some of these apps and granted sites access to your LinkedIn profile. You can find a list of these applications and partners under Authorized Applications in the Privacy Settings section, and remove them accordingly.
Removing the applications from this page will remove them from your LinkedIn home page, profile page and prevent any further access to your LinkedIn data. If you only want to remove them from your profile page, choose “Edit My Profile” and click the remove link next to the title of the application.
The same goes with the external Websites that you have granted access to your profile and network data: removing the access here will prevent them from accessing your LinkedIn data. If you want to re-enable them in the future, visit the Website and grant access again.
