Stuart R. Crawford
Senior Advisor and Partner
Ulistic Inc.
403.775.2205
scrawford@ulistic.com

LinkedIn is one of the industry leading social networks and online communities in use
today across multiple businesses and industries. LinkedIn’s focus on business-to-
business networking and facilitating the sharing of ideas and strategies has won the
trust of business professionals globally. Not unlike many of their counterparts, LinkedIn
does have privacy challenges according to many CEO level executives. Many
organizations are now reviewing their policies related to LinkedIn and how information
propagates through this business social network.

More and more business professionals are turning to LinkedIn because of its overall
effectiveness in the marketplace. However, many are unaware of the apparent risks to
corporate contacts when setting up their LinkedIn accounts. There are many settings
that are on automatically allowing for browsing of contacts and also leaving a trace of
who visited another profile. Many organizations as part of their social media acceptable
use policy are now requiring specific changes to LinkedIn privacy settings be made
ensuring business contacts and information are kept confidential.

LinkedIn is build on a community and like many other online networks; they embrace
the sharing of information and contacts. How do businesses balance the foundations of
LinkedIn with the compliance and confidentiality measures of business today?

The following recommended key privacy settings guidelines ideal for organizations
leveraging LinkedIn to make sure a certain degree of privacy remains in place. These
settings are accessible through the SETTINGS menu in the top right corner of your
LinkedIn page.

The “Connections Browse” option allows your contacts (those connected
directly to you) to browse your LinkedIn connections. Disabling to enable
this feature will prevent your connections from seeing who you are directly
connected too. This will make sure key vendors contacts and clients
connected through LinkedIn remains confidential.

when you visit another persons LinkedIn profile. Engaging this setting will
leave information about you when visiting a profile on LinkedIn, your
information becomes available to that member. Turning this off disables
this information from being left. You can choose to leave your full details;
your job industry and title only or simply leave no trace that you were there.