ValATL2021

The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry. The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine. The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true. The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either. The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought. The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to. The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer. Now it is today. Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus. He is confident. He has always been confident. The confidence has never been the problem. The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.

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.

Afghanistan’s education minister has announced that women are permanently banned from schools. UN Women has not said a word.