More about our mobile calendar feature

You may have seen a few press stories highlighting concerns about how your data is used in the opt-in calendar feature of our mobile phone apps. We deeply care about our members trust so I want to provide clarity around what we do, don’t do, and outline ways we are going to make a great feature even better.

For those not familiar with our calendar feature, with your permission, we sync with your mobile device’s calendar to provide information about the people you are about to meet by showing you their LinkedIn profile.

In order to provide our calendar service to those who choose to use it, we need to send information about your calendar events to our servers so we can match people with LinkedIn profiles. That information is sent securely over SSL and we never share or store your calendar information.

In an effort to make that algorithm for matching people with profiles increasingly smarter we pull the complete calendar event, including email addresses of people you are meeting with, meeting subject, location and meeting notes.

Researchers have pointed out that some people might be uncomfortable, specifically with meeting notes, so we’d like to be very clear about what we do and not do with this data:

We Do:

  • We ask your permission before accessing your calendar, this will continue to be an opt-in feature
  • We provide you with a way to turn off the calendar feature at any time in the settings
  • We send calendar data to our server only when the LinkedIn app is launched to be matched with relevant LinkedIn profiles of meeting attendees
  • We send your calendar data to our servers over a secure SSL connection

We Don't: 

  • We do not store any calendar information on our servers
  • We do not share or use your calendar data for purposes other than matching it with relevant LinkedIn profiles
  • We do not under any circumstances access your calendar data unless you have explicitly opted in to sync your calendar

We Will Improve:

  • We will no longer send data from the meeting notes section of your calendar event
  • There will be a new “learn more” link to provide more information about how your calendar data is being used

These improvements are live on Android now and have been submitted to the Apple store and will be available shortly.

It’s a great feature. We hope you try it out. If at any time you decide it’s not for you then you can always go to the mobile apps settings page to turn off the calendar feature.

We look forward to continue improving and delivering great mobile experiences that help you be more successful.