It amazing really. If you reached out to people and asked them for the information and graph that LinkedIn maintains, most employers would fire them.
I'm ashamed to say I worked at one such place for several months.
Apollo is probably the most comprehensive source for this. It's creepy as fuck.
It helps a lot but I still get a lot of sales goons. A lot of them follow up constantly too "hey what about that meeting invite I sent you why did you not attend"? My deleted email box is full of them (I instantly block them the minute I get an invite to anything from someone I don't know, and I wish Outlook had the ability to ban the entire origin domain too but it doesn't)
If it enables a tiny startup trying to solve the exact problem I have to reach out to me – I’d say it’s a net positive (but not by a huge margin), and having to blacklist @mongodb.com with their certifications bullshit is a price I’m ready to pay. If more spammers get their hands on this kind of dataset though it’ll probably be a disaster.
Maybe the thought occurs that one is only accessible on LinkedIn on purpose and just because a recruiter from 8 years ago has your number, it's not up for grabs?
What do you mean by "intelligence platform"?
It's "intelligence platform" in the sense that you can gain a ton of information on individuals, organizations, and relationships that drive it all. If you can track how people move and interact between organizations, you can determine who someone is doing business with and even make an educated guess if that's a sale or interview.
I started writing about it almost 20 years ago: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/linkedin-intelligence-part-ii and turned it into a conference presentation called "Shattering Secrets with Social Media"
But there have been numerous proofs of concept over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage