LinkedIn has rolled out a major change to their Who’s Viewed My Profile feature. They promise to show better and more detailed information about who is viewing your profile and from the preview, it looks like they succeeded. It looks like a really nice feature and was a long time coming, but there’s a catch. You knew that there had to be a catch, right?
In order to now see ANY details about who is viewing your profile, you now have to set your privacy to the least restrictive setting. This means that for every profile page you visit, that person will not be able to see your name, picture, and title right on their Who’s View My Profile page. Previously, each individual could choose the granularity of data that was available to the profile owner. You could also make the choice to release all of your information, but you could also limit the information shared to more general industry information or turn off sharing completely. In each case, you could still see a limited amount of information about who viewed your profile. If you upgraded to a premium account, you could then see more history.
The improved viewer statistics look interesting, but make no mistake, we lost the ability to manage our privacy with this upgrade.
Are you going to open up your profile in return for the improved access to these analytics? Do you think this will change the way you use LinkedIn? I would love to hear your thoughts.
