Linkedin have changed their privacy settings, making email addresses private to connections. This has arguably increased the privacy and security of users, but may have negative consequences on businesses or recruiters using Linkedin to gain email addresses through connections.

This new setting has been quietly introduced and blocks users from exporting email addresses.Linkedin state: “This is a new setting that gives our members even more control of their email address on LinkedIn. If you take a look at the setting titled ‘Who can download your email’, you’ll see we’ve added a more detailed setting that defaults to the strongest privacy option. Members can choose to change that setting based on their preference. This gives our members control over who can download their email address via a data export.”

The option to show or hide your email address can be changed under Settings & Privacy – Privacy – Who Can See My Email Address? – Allow your connections to download your email [address of user] in their data export?. Significantly the toggle now defaults to No.Most users don’t know this exists because LinkedIn has not widely announced it. That means nearly no one’s email addresses will appear in LinkedIn Archive exports anymore. Your connections will still be able to see your email address if they navigate to your profile, but they can’t grab this from their whole graph.

Facebook came to the same conclusion about restricting email exports when it was in a data portability fight with Google in 2010. Facebook had been encouraging users to import their Gmail contacts, but prohibited users exporting their Friends’ email addresses. Facebook argued that users have ownership of friends email addresses privately, but not those of their Friends solely through Facebook. On a social network like Facebook, preventing email address being exported makes more sense but LinkedIn’s professional network is used differently. Users purposefully connect with those they don’t know to gain professional contacts, and where exporting has always been allowed, making this change subtly could result in some unhappy users.