Linkedin Blog

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.

We’d like to let our members know that a week from now, on June 7th 2012, we’re planning to update our Privacy Policy and User Agreement to provide you greater control over your data with further clarity on our terms.

Here are a couple of key areas the updated Policy will encompass:

In keeping with our commitment to put our members first, we’d like to announce upcoming updates, mostly straightforward clarifications of our our User Agreement and Privacy Policy that will be live in the coming week.

Among the changes to these documents are a couple that we’d like to call out here:

LinkedIn takes member privacy and security seriously. Unfortunately, hackers are trying different means to exploit vulnerabilities on websites, like a recent report suggested was possible.

As you can imagine, we are constantly working on improving our site security measures. Among others, we currently support SSL technology (Secure Sockets Layer) for logins and other sensitive pages such as member settings. SSL ensures that the information between your computer and LinkedIn servers is encrypted so it cannot be snooped on.

In addition, we are accelerating our existing plans to extend SSL support across the entire site on an opt-in basis. We are also going to reduce the lifespan of our authentication cookies to better protect our members.