TechCrunch was tipped off by a reader that emails were no longer coming through as part of LinkedIn’s Archive tool for exporting your data. Now LinkedIn confirms to TechCrunch that “This is a new setting that gives our members even more control of their email address on LinkedIn.If you take a look at the setting titled ‘Who can download your email’, you’ll see we’ve added a more detailed setting that defaults to the strongest privacy option.
This “Allow your connections to download your email in their data export?” toggle defaults to “No.” Most users don’t know it exists because LinkedIn didn’t announce it; there’s merely been a folded up section added to the Help centeron email visibility, and few might voluntarily change it to “Yes” as there’s no explanation of why you’d want to. Your connections will still be able to see your email address if they navigate to your profile, but they can’t grab those from their whole graph.
But trying to hide a change that’s massively impactful to businesses that rely on LinkedIn could erode the trust of its core users.Original article