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Comment by waterlink | Hacker News Reader

Hold on.

You don’t provide LinkedIn credentials in any way to me or to my website. You use it to authorize with LinkedIn (similar way, you can authorize with Facebook, Github, Google, Twitter, and other OAuth platforms).

The only thing that my website can read (and for very limited amount of time):

- Your email address, - First name and last name, - Unique LinkedIn ID, - LinkedIn profile photo URL.

That is it. There is no write permission for anything. This authentication token doesn’t allow anyone to log in into your LinkedIn account.

This type of technology is called an Authentication Provider, and is used to authenticate you on my website (not on LinkedIn).

Here you can read exactly how I process the data mentioned above: https://www.fellowage.io/privacy#linkedin-profile-data

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"Keep your data anonymous"

Even though I personally understand why you are going with Linkedin, you cannot claim that data is anonymous if you require Linkedin account to authenticate. Privacy has nothing to do the with the technical implementation. You are just explaining oAuth but the point is that you already who I am since you require Linkedin. So it is not anonymous. Not for YOU at least.

It’s not anonymous in a sense that I’m going to see your linkedin profile. I could have found your profile on my own if I wanted to (that’s what LinkedIn is for in the first place).

What’s important is that I’m not going to see the numbers you entered.

Also, since I’m verifying every registration (in half-automated/half-manual way), and it takes about 20 seconds to do the verification, I cannot possibly remember who I’ve seen and what profiles do they have. (simply because I’m human).

Additionally, what is important is for what purposes you allow me to process your data. And the only purpose for this LinkedIn data is to verify your company name, job title, and location. Once that is done, the data gets removed or disassociated from your account, which means that it can no longer be meaningfully processed (anonymized), and since I don’t have your permission to do any other types of processing—I won’t.

EDIT: So what is anonymous are the salary numbers—and that is what I’m talking about on the landing page.

Nope - it’s a matter of trust, and asking for credentials, or even a login, breaches that until the site is credible.

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