What tool is used to extract data from LinkedIn?

What is LinkedIn scraping?

It's really quite simple to understand, and it does happen on a fairly regular basis.

LinkedIn is scraping all of your profile, and all of the data that you have uploaded there.

For the most part, they do this so that they can show their users suggested connections. To understand what this means, think of this scenario. Let's say that your LinkedIn profile has a great deal of information in it. The company that you work for is a very large one, with a lot of followers. They see that your profile has a lot of detail about you, and they want to make sure that their users are getting the best idea of what you are all about. So, they scrap your profile, and add some suggested connections.

Now, their users are seeing something similar to the screenshot above. Now, it's possible that you had nothing to do with those connections. However, LinkedIn will not tell you that. They will just say that you are connected.

What happens next? Well, you don't really know. In fact, there is not much you can do about it. LinkedIn will leave it up to you, whether or not you want them to scrape your profile.

However, if you do not want them to scrap your profile, then there is a bit more that you can do. You can go into the settings section of your profile, and then select Private content. This will stop LinkedIn from scraping your profile, which is really what you want.

Scraping in the background. The reason that we see this scraping is that LinkedIn uses a service called Sparrow. Sparrow is a real-time search service, which basically means that it will go through the web, and look for all of the items that you have posted there. Once it finds them, it then indexes them and keeps them for you.

As you can imagine, this can be a pretty significant drain on your data plan. So, what is the solution? Well, there is really no solution. However, if you do not want LinkedIn to continue to scrape your profile, then you need to change your privacy settings.

This is where you can either just change them, or block the whole company.

Is there a LinkedIn extension for Chrome?

Yes, you can create a Chrome extension using the Linkedin Developers API.

You'll need to use the Linkedin API version 1.0.

The API is pretty complex, so we'll try to be brief. You can refer to my previous post, which goes through the process of creating an extension for LinkedIn in detail. Note: I created this extension on a Windows 7 machine, and I tried it on a Linux Ubuntu machine as well, both with the same result. The documentation states that you need Internet Explorer or Chrome for the Linkedin API to work, but it actually works in any browser.

The first step is to register for a developer account on LinkedIn (free if you have a LinkedIn account). Once you've done that, you can access your developer account at developers.linkedin. Once you have access to your account, you need to switch to the Test Applications tab in your account. You can find this by going to and selecting Test applications from the navigation bar. Select Request API Key and follow the instructions.

You'll need to enter a valid e-mail address for security purposes, and then give them your first name and the last name of your company, or your personal email address (whichever is easier for you). Then click Continue. After that, go to the Google Chrome Extensions section of the Web Store. You'll see a new project titled Test. Open that, and you should see a box in the middle of your screen with the option to upload the chrome extension file you've just downloaded. Save the extension file, and click Install.

Once installed, you'll need to go back to and click on your Test project again, then click on the Developer Keys tab. You'll need to add the app you created above to your developer account.