BostonMermaids

The lack of any fundamental curiosity at all about AI from the left has been one of the most discouraging things of my life, but that’s okay because I will simply become the epicenter of a new and cooler left that likes technology

I am the Director of Professional Signal Intelligence at LinkedIn. Every time you log in, we search your computer. Not metaphorically. We run code that scans your installed software. Every browser extension. Every application. We catalog it. We transmit it to our servers. We share it with a third-party cybersecurity firm you've never heard of. The tracking pixel is zero pixels wide. We hid it off-screen. You never consented. We never asked. Our privacy policy doesn't mention it. That's networking. We call the program Project Handshake internally. The Slack channel is handshake-telem. In 2024 we scanned for 461 products. By February this year we scan for over 6,000. I don't know what all of them are. Nobody does. Someone on my team added categories for browser extensions that identify practicing Muslims. Someone added extensions for neurodivergent users. Someone added 509 job search tools. That last one is my favorite. We can tell which of our one billion users are secretly looking for new jobs. On the platform where their current boss checks their profile. That's networking. We scan for 200 products that compete with LinkedIn's sales tools. Apollo. Lusha. ZoomInfo. We know each user's real name, employer, and job title. We mapped exactly which companies use which competitor products. We extracted their customer lists from their users' browsers. Without anyone knowing. Then we sent legal threats to the users we caught. The EU told us to open our platform to third-party tools. We published two restricted APIs. They handle 0.07 calls per second. Our internal API, Voyager, handles 163,000 calls per second. In Microsoft's 249-page compliance report, the word "Voyager" appears zero times. That's networking. I presented our Software Disclosure Rate metrics at a leadership summit last quarter. The conference room is called The Fishbowl. Glass walls. Appropriate. There's a plaque on the wall. Q3 Competitive Landscape Award. I won it for the extension scanning initiative. Someone asked if users had a way to opt out. I said they can close their browser. The room laughed. I wasn't sure why. I browse LinkedIn on a Chromebook with no extensions. Most of the team does. The platform that helps you get hired searches your computer every time you visit. We know your name. We know your employer. We know your religion. Your disabilities. Your politics. Whether you're looking to leave. That's networking. The system works exactly as designed. I designed it.

“It can’t be THAT bad. You’re exaggerating.” “I’m really not. It is THAT bad.” “But what does that mean, in real terms?” …