Update: Our new User Agreement and Privacy Policy are effective as of March 26, 2014.
At LinkedIn, we’re committed to putting our members first. We believe it’s essential for you to always feel informed and empowered when it comes to your information on LinkedIn. With this in mind, we wanted to highlight some upcoming changes to our Terms of Service (which includes our User Agreement and Privacy Policy).
Over the past two years, we welcomed SlideShare and Pulse to the LinkedIn platform, and we’ve done a lot to make them a core part of what LinkedIn is today. To further simplify the member experience, we will integrate SlideShare and Pulse’s Terms of Service into LinkedIn’s, so you’ll only have one set of terms to agree to when interacting with LinkedIn properties.
Additionally, we will enable you to discover opportunities and share content across our services. For example, your SlideShare experience can be personalized based on your LinkedIn profile, your network, and your engagement with content from both services. Or with Pulse, we’ll be able to deliver the most relevant personalized professional content to help you stay informed.
Here are some other changes you’ll see in our Terms of Service:
Updates to Our Privacy Policy
Member data. We’ve always had a high bar when it comes to responding to government requests for member data and that hasn’t changed. In Section 2.14, we clarify that we will take steps to let members know about demands for their data unless we’re legally prohibited from doing so or the request is deemed an emergency. We also specify that we may dispute such demands if we believe they are too broad, too vague, or lack proper authority.
Premium services. While it is not new that LinkedIn offers premium services that give our customers access to members’ profiles to generate career and business opportunities, we’ve rewritten Section 2.12 to clarify that our corporate offerings include Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions and Sales Solutions.
Mobile numbers. As LinkedIn expands our services globally, we recognize that the mobile phone has become a ubiquitous communications tool. We’ve updated Section 1.2 to include the forthcoming option to use your mobile number to sign in to LinkedIn.
Update to Our User Agreement
Content Availability. LinkedIn has always operated within the laws and frameworks of the countries in which we operate. We recently launched a LinkedIn site in Simplified Chinese, and as we said at the time of our launch, we may be required by local regulations to remove certain content, which means this content may not be available on LinkedIn in China. While LinkedIn has always reserved the right to remove content (e.g. when it’s hurtful or infringing on others’ rights), we believe it’s important to be transparent that sometimes laws may require us to remove certain content, and we make that clear in Section 4.1.
These changes will take effect on March 26, 2014. See what the new Terms of Service will look like here: User Agreement and Privacy Policy.