LinkedIn May Use Your Photo In Social Advertising

I certainly never checked that box!

Facebook has been known to “go Rambo” on user privacy, but it seems that LinkedIn may just be following the same path. It seems that by default, accounts are setup to agree to this: “LinkedIn my use my name, photo in social advertising”. I just checked my account (opened a long time ago), and that’s true (at least, in my case).

To be honest, I’m not quite sure when this has started and I learned about it after Sophos, posted on their “naked security” blog. Frankly, I find this unbelievable. It’s not that I mind being in a cool ad myself, but LinkedIn should never have checked that box for me.

I have since turned this option OFF, and if you don’t want to appear on a LinkedIn “social ad”, you may want to check your privacy settings. It’s in Settings>Account>Privacy Controls>Manage Social Advertising. What do you think of this? Did LinkedIn go too far, or don’t you consider this information to be private? After all, this may be not so different from having your Facebook photo appear in a “Fan page”.