Jake Savin Posts

I’ve said this in a few other places:

There are potentially important conflicts of interest in Microsoft now owning LinkedIn. A few examples:

• Microsoft will gain visibility into private profiles and hidden information in public profiles, job listings, applications, etc. for many thousands of competitors and their employees.
• Microsoft could potentially watch for changes to private profiles of current Microsoft employees to see who is thinking of leaving.
• Microsoft could monitor interactions between current employees and recruiters, other companies, job applications, etc.

Any of these things could be done in aggregate without violating any laws or privacy policies. More troubling is that these powers could also be misused either in an official capacity or seriptiously by unscruplous employees or managers.

Microsoft monitoring employee behavior isn’t unprecedented. I’d heard that in the mid-2000’s, there were instances where security would be called to escort people out of the building if their manager found out that they’d accepted a position at Google. It also was (is?) a fireable offense in some teams if engineers were caught reading patents or looking at code from open source projects.

I have no evidence that Microsoft will actually do any of those things, but…

I. Don’t. Like it.