LinkedIn, the passive industrial espionage engine
Plus the Blade Runner question for AI generators
I joined LinkedIn in, if memory serves, 2003, the same year that it was founded. I’m confident that it was that early because my signup email was an independent.co.uk one, at the time when I worked at The Independent (a daily UK national paper). As technology correspondent/editor, I was intrigued by this new way of using the internet, which seemed to have found a clever idea for putting people in touch with each other.
Then I left The Independent, and didn’t really think much more of LinkedIn: the rise of the less narrow social networks, notably Facebook and Twitter, meant that there didn’t seem much use for it. Why connect with business people when you could connect with everyone?
Over the years that has mainly been my attitude towards the network: there might be a lot of people there, but there are more people doing more interesting things elsewhere, more accessibly; LinkedIn has a peculiar attribute where if you’re logged in to your account, it can be more difficult to do searches of who’s on it than if you’re not logged in. (This behaviour may have changed; it has been a while since I’ve used LinkedIn.)
What LinkedIn (hereafter LI) has been great for, as many journalists have discovered, is finding who’s working where. Well obviously! But clues from people changing their LI profile have fed many an important story. Below is a clip from a simple example of this process in action:
As I say in that caption, LI is a fantastic engine for passive industrial espionage. One of the links below (of the week in AI madness) details a “buzzy AI startup for generating 3D models which used human labour”. And how did the writers confirm this? You guessed it: plenty of searching on LI:
404 Media found LinkedIn profiles for Kaedim workers in Argentina, England, Indonesia, Ethiopia, India, Greece, the Czech Republic, Colombia, and Spain. These people listed their position as “Quality Assurance” or “Quality Control.”
For journalists, LI is thus a fantastic resource, rather as Twitter used to be. The nice thing about LI is that people tend to leave the details of their past there too, so you can do some job archaeology if you can find the right details.
This applies of course to recruiters, who naturally comb through LI for details of people who might be useful. But it must apply too to competitors wanting to know who has been hired or moved within a rival company (or even their own). What always puzzles me is why people do these updates. Possibly I haven’t grasped something about the (surely American) mindset of the middle management population segment, but announcing that you’ve been promoted to the regional manager of whatever seems the sort of thing that says how unimportant you are, not the opposite.
All that aside—though I do think the passive industrial espionage element is underrated—it seems that some people try to make LI into a sort of jolly Facebook. The Washington Post this week reported that “LinkedIn is getting weirdly personal and not everyone likes it”:
She wanted to be open and real. So Erika Taylor-Beck got vulnerable on social media.
“I don’t always have it all together,” she wrote before revealing that she had been sexually abused, had turned to self-harm and binge drinking as coping mechanisms and has struggled with social anxiety and depression. “I share my ‘dirty laundry’ because it has made me who I am. … I’m grateful, and I want to help others get here too.”
Taylor-Beck, 40, made these confessions along with words of encouragement on LinkedIn, the social network more than 930 million people use globally for professional networking and job searching. As a vice president of e-learning and health-care compliance company Relias, she wanted to lead by example.
“I wanted to create a culture where folks felt like they could bring their whole selves to work,” she said. “So sharing my experiences so you feel safe to share yours.”
Well, OK, Erika, but on a professional network for job searching? Yet it seems to be breaking out all over:
Some LinkedIn users who started sharing parts of their personal lives on the platform found it to be rewarding in more ways than one. Casey Nelson, founder and CEO of tech consulting company StakWise Data Automation, recently shared something he hadn’t told anyone past his inner circle of friends and family: He’s going through a divorce.
Nelson, of Waxahachie, Tex., said he revealed the news because he wanted his professional connections to know why he hadn’t been posting lately, as he often uses LinkedIn to connect with clients. He also recalled how a friend’s previous Facebook post discussing her divorce helped reassure him about his. He wanted to pay it forward.
Again, this seems like a really excellent piece of passive industrial espionage. Are you a foreign state looking to take advantage of the CEO of a tech consulting company? No need to think about his vulnerabilities—he’ll tell you about them right here! Divorce, mm, tasty. Why not create a fake LI profile using Thispersondoesnotexist and create a fake profile and befriend them?
Certainly the “fake profile” part has been happening: last year, disinformation researchers uncovered a nest of around a thousand of them which used AI-generated photos:
Social media accounts using computer-generated faces have pushed Chinese disinformation; harassed activists; and masqueraded as Americans supporting former President Donald Trump and independent news outlets spreading pro-Kremlin propaganda.
NPR found that many of the LinkedIn profiles seem to have a far more mundane purpose: drumming up sales for companies big and small. Accounts like Keenan Ramsey's [which first raised the researchers’ suspicions] send messages to potential customers. Anyone who takes the bait gets connected to a real salesperson who tries to close the deal. Think telemarketing for the digital age.
There are also plenty of scams, as you’d expect. Overall, though, my feeling about LI remains as it has been for ages: it doesn’t do the things that Facebook and Twitter do. It’s not a source of social warming because it doesn’t allow the free-for-all and feedback loops that those do. Sure, it’s a great way to spy on your competitors, or perhaps to find your next job. Just watch out for the AI-generated profiles trying to set up a phone call with their sales rep—or worse.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)
• Will we ever be able to detect AI usage? Andres Guadamuz (who is a UK-based academic specialising in this space) asks the difficult questions, Blade Runner-style.
• Apple is “secretly” spending big on a ChatGPT rival to reinvent Siri and Applecare. And not before time. Spending in the single-digit billions of R+D per year out of a total R+D spend of around $30bn per year, so it’s not the very highest priority (or else it’s a very spending-efficient one).
• Buzzy AI startup for generating 3D models used cheap human labour. Maybe the tsunami has been slightly delayed after all. Or it’s just a good way to get some VC money.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.