LinkedIn forced to ‘pause’ mentioned in the news feature in Europe after complaints about ID mix-ups

LinkedIn has been forced to ‘pause’ a feature in Europe in which the platform emails members’ connections when they’ve been ‘mentioned in the news’.

The regulatory action follows a number of data protection complaints after LinkedIn’s algorithms incorrect matched members to news articles — triggering a review of the feature and subsequent suspension order.

The feature appears as a case study in the ‘Technology Multinationals Supervision’ section of an annual report published today by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). Although the report does not explicitly name LinkedIn — but we’ve confirmed it is the named professional social network.

The data watchdog’s report cites “two complaints about a feature on a professional networking platform” after LinkedIn incorrectly associated the members with media articles that were not actually about them.

“In one of the complaints, a media article that set out details of the private life and unsuccessful career of a person of the same name as the complainant was circulated to the complainant’s connections and followers by the data controller,” the DPC writes, noting the complainant initially complained to the company itself but did not receive a satisfactory response — hence taking up the matter with the regulator.

“The complainant stated that the article had been detrimental to their professional standing and had resulted in the loss of contracts for their business,” it adds.

“The second complaint involved the circulation of an article that the complainant believed could be detrimental to future career prospects, which the data controller had not vetted correctly.”

LinkedIn appears to have been matching members to news articles by simple name matching — with obvious potential for identity mix-ups between people with shared names.

“It was clear from the complaints that matching by name only was insufficient, giving rise to data protection concerns, primarily the lawfulness, fairness and accuracy of the personal data processing utilised by the ‘Mentions in the news’ feature,” the DPC writes.

“As a result of these complaints and the intervention of the DPC, the data controller undertook a review of the feature. The result of this review was to suspend the feature for EU-based members, pending improvements to safeguard its members’ data.”

We reached out to LinkedIn with questions and it pointed us to this blog post where it confirms: “We are pausing our Mentioned in the News feature for our EU members while we reevaluate its effectiveness.”

LinkedIn adds that it is reviewing the accuracy of the feature, writing:

As referenced in the Irish Data Protection Commission’s report, we received useful feedback from our members about the feature and as a result are evaluating the accuracy and functionality of Mentioned in the News for all members.

The company’s blog post also points users to a page where they can find out more about the ‘mentioned in the news’ feature and get information on how to manage their LinkedIn email notification settings.

The Irish DPC’s action is not the first privacy strike against LinkedIn in Europe.

Late last year, in its early annual report, on the pre-GDPR portion of 2018, the watchdog revealed it had investigated complaints about LinkedIn related to it targeting non-users with adverts for its service.

The DPC found the company had obtained emails for 18 million people for whom it did not have consent to process their data. In that case LinkedIn agreed to cease processing the data entirely.

That complaint also led the DPC to audit LinkedIn. It then found a further privacy problem, discovering the company had been using its social graph algorithms to try to build suggested networks of compatible professional connections for non-members.

The regulator ordered LinkedIn to cease this “pre-compute processing” of non-members’ data and delete all personal data associated with it prior to GDPR coming into force.

LinkedIn said it had “voluntarily changed our practices as a result”.