---
author:
email: mail@petermolnar.net
image: https://petermolnar.net/favicon.jpg
name: Peter Molnar
url: https://petermolnar.net
copies:
- http://web.archive.org/web/20180114124716/https://petermolnar.net/linkedin-public-settings-ignored/
lang: en
published: '2018-01-14T12:00:00+00:00'
summary: Logged out users are prevented from reaching LinkedIn profiles set to complete
public visibility
tags:
- internet
title: LinkedIn is ignoring user settings
---
A few days ago, on the \#indieweb Freenode channel[^1] one of the users
asked if we knew an indieweb-friendly way of getting data out of
LinkedIn. I wasn't paying attention to any recent news related to
LinkedIn, though I've heard a few things, such as they are struggling to
prevent data scraping: the note mentioned that they believe it's a
problem that employers keep an eye on changes in LinkedIn profiles via
3rd party. This, indeed, can be an issue, but there are ways to manage
this within LinkedIn: your public profile settings[^2].
In my case, this was set to visible to everyone for years, and by the
time I had to set it up (again: years), it was working as intended. But
a few days ago, for my surprise, visiting my profile while logged out
resulted in this:
and this:
``` {.bash}
$ wget -O- https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolnareu
--2018-01-14 10:26:12-- https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolnareu
Resolving www.linkedin.com (www.linkedin.com)... 91.225.248.129, 2620:109:c00c:104::b93f:9001
Connecting to www.linkedin.com (www.linkedin.com)|91.225.248.129|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 999 Request denied
2018-01-14 10:26:12 ERROR 999: Request denied.
```
or this:
``` {.bash}
$ curl https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolnareu
```
So I started digging. According to the LinkedIn FAQ[^3] there is a page
where you can set your profile's public visibility. Those settings, for
me, were still set to: 
Despite the settings, there is no public profile for logged out users.
I'd like to understand what it going on, because so far, this looks like
a fat lie from LinkedIn. Hopefully just a bug.
## UPDATE
~~I tried setting referrers and user agents, used different IP
addresses, still nothing.~~ I can't type today and managed to mistype
`https://google.com` - the referrer ended up as `https:/google.com`. So,
following the notes on HN, setting a referrer to Google sometimes works.
After a few failures it will lock you out again, referrer or not. This
is even uglier if it was a proper authwall for everyone.
``` {.bash}
curl 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermolnareu' \
-e 'https://google.com/' \
-H 'accept-encoding: text' -H \
'accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9,' \
-H 'user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.132 Safari/537.36'
```
``` {.html}
...
```
[^1]:
[^2]:
[^3]: