Of course, hurries to clarify Linked-In, the professional social network with 830 million members worldwide, this experiment also took place in compliance with the terms of use and the privacy policy and the respective user settings.
Of course, it has been written on the company's website for years that Linked-In is constantly working on improving its offers by testing innovations.
However, experiments that override settings made by users or that aim to influence the moods or feelings of members or to create a negative user experience are excluded.
The latter clarification was published by LinkedIn after Facebook was criticized in the summer of 2014 because the group had been playing morose or happy status messages in the timelines of around 350,000 profiles for a week in order to find out whether the users themselves were increasing as a result of this change published bad or good-humoured messages.
The former clarification had recently become necessary when it was revealed that Linked-In had studied its users to an extent that puts Facebook's research in the shade, at least numerically: For five years, Linked-In had twenty million members an easy Modified selection of networking suggestions, fed to "People You May Know" to check
Users have not been notified of being part of this trial, it has not even been publicly announced.
Fifty years ago, the American sociologist Mark Granovetter surveyed fewer than three hundred people for his sensational study “The Strength of Weak Ties” and was able to show that those who were looking for work benefited particularly from loose connections, from accidental hearsay from acquaintances.
Not surprisingly, this is no different in the age of social networks.
Two billion new connections were created in the five years of their experiment, the Linked-In researchers now emphasize, and six hundred thousand new jobs were found.
Not only the question of how many jobs some of the twenty million users who took part in this experiment without their consent,