A colleague was leaving, and I'd been asked to go around the team of 200 people, gathering farewell greetings. Another work project at the same time was the software language translations for our product.
I manually trimmed the list of 200 colleagues down to 70 "international" names. Then I manually searched for each colleague on Google, and clicked the first link. Usually that was Facebook or LinkedIn.
I manually viewed 55 LinkedIn profiles over the course of 2 hours, and copy-pasted out only their "spoken language" field.
LinkedIn proceeded to block my account.
"Your account has violated the LinkedIn User Agreement and Professional Community Policies. Due to the number and/or the severity of these violations, this account has been permanently restricted."
Politely explaining the situation to several customer service agents [Case: 211020-004202] didn't help. Had I been warned about viewing too many profiles too quickly, I'd certainly have slowed down! My actions weren't automated. I'd rather return to their online community and make this a learning experience, if possible.
Being unable to use LinkedIn may affect my future career prospects, but I feel powerless to change it at this stage.
> I manually viewed 55 LinkedIn profiles over the course of 2 hours, and copy-pasted out only their "spoken language" field.
It sounds insane, but I suspect what tripped their heuristic was not so much looking at a lot of profiles but not messsaging any of them within LinkedIn's messaging system, which is their use-case for making money (recruiter/journalist/hiring manager/etc.) So your browsing behavior appears to LI's heuristics either like a scraper or a legit user who isn't likely to convert into a paying customer, and they simply don't care which you are (whatever the TOS might allow).
I'm shocked LI's heuristics are that bad. I recommend you post your issue here (suitably anonymized) as a separate thread (link from here), and I expect it'll get upvoted.
A colleague was leaving, and I'd been asked to go around the team of 200 people, gathering farewell greetings. Another work project at the same time was the software language translations for our product.
I manually trimmed the list of 200 colleagues down to 70 "international" names. Then I manually searched for each colleague on Google, and clicked the first link. Usually that was Facebook or LinkedIn.
I manually viewed 55 LinkedIn profiles over the course of 2 hours, and copy-pasted out only their "spoken language" field.
LinkedIn proceeded to block my account. "Your account has violated the LinkedIn User Agreement and Professional Community Policies. Due to the number and/or the severity of these violations, this account has been permanently restricted."
Politely explaining the situation to several customer service agents [Case: 211020-004202] didn't help. Had I been warned about viewing too many profiles too quickly, I'd certainly have slowed down! My actions weren't automated. I'd rather return to their online community and make this a learning experience, if possible.
Being unable to use LinkedIn may affect my future career prospects, but I feel powerless to change it at this stage.