Everything that makes you, you
The basics: your name, your face, your work history, your skills. Standard stuff — until you notice they also keep your zip code, your Twitter handle, and your phone numbers in separate files.
Your name, headline, summary, industry, zip code, geo location, Twitter handles, websites, and instant messenger IDs. All in one row.
Your complete employment history — company name, title, description, location, and start/end dates. Every role you've ever listed.
Every email address you've ever associated with your account, kept in its own dedicated file.
Your phone numbers — also in their own file, separate from your profile.
Your schools, self-listed skills, and the date you first registered. Skills includes things you added years ago and forgot about.
Individually, these files are benign. Combined, they're a complete identity profile. Full name + zip code + phone number + email + employment history is everything needed for targeted phishing, impersonation, or social engineering. In a data breach, this isn't just an email and password — it's you.
A complete record of your activity
Every message. Every comment. Every post. Every reaction. Going back years. Over 27,000 rows of your words and actions.
Every DM you've ever sent or received. Full message content, timestamps, conversation IDs, sender/recipient profile URLs, folder location, attachments, and whether it was a draft. Twelve thousand messages.
Every comment you've left on any post, with the date, a link to the post, and the full text of your comment.
Every post you've shared — date, link, your full commentary text, any shared URL, media URL, and visibility setting.
Every reaction, categorized by type. Not just "like" — LinkedIn separately tracks LIKE, EMPATHY, PRAISE, ENTERTAINMENT, and APPRECIATION. Each is a data point about your emotional response to content.
Every search query, timestamped, going back years. The same search often appears 2–4 times with identical timestamps, suggesting LinkedIn logs each filter interaction as a separate event. Searching job titles? LinkedIn uses that to infer you're job hunting — and sells that signal to recruiters.
Poll votes, reposts, saved items, and event interactions. Every micro-action, catalogued.
Before 2019, "Like" was the only option — no emotional data. Once LinkedIn added reaction types, my pattern shifted: I lead with Praise and Empathy, rarely just "Like" anymore. LinkedIn can read this shift. They know I respond to people's struggles and celebrate their wins. That's not a feature preference. That's a personality profile.
This is the algorithm. Your reaction types tell LinkedIn what emotions drive your engagement. Your searches reveal your intent — job titles you're curious about, people you're researching. Your comments and shares tell them what topics activate you. All of this feeds the ranking model that controls what shows up in your feed every day. It's also training data for AI — 12,000+ messages and 7,000+ comments of natural human conversation, with emotional labels attached, owned by the same company that owns a major stake in OpenAI.
Your advertising dossier
This is where it gets real. LinkedIn maintains a massive profile of inferred attributes about you — and sells access to it. Here's what mine looks like.
Just four rows, but each one is a judgment LinkedIn has made about you:
These are the categories advertisers can target. LinkedIn decided you "influence public opinion" based on "factors such as your experience, industry, and activity."
A single row with hundreds of semicolon-delimited values crammed into each cell. Columns include: age range, gender, buyer groups, company names, company followers, company category, company size, degrees, schools, growth rate, fields of study, company connections, job functions, member gender, groups, industries, interests, locales, traits, locations, revenue, seniorities, skills, job titles, and years of experience.
Every ad you've clicked and your engagement with the LinkedIn Audience Network (ads on third-party sites that LinkedIn serves).
These are the 400+ interest labels LinkedIn assigned to me — a creative strategist. Red tags are the ones that have nothing to do with my actual work or interests.
I work in creative strategy and AI consulting. I have never expressed interest in Swordmanship, Baby Showers, Active DoD Secret Clearance, Nanorobotics, Weapons Training, or Pick and Pack. I didn't list these. LinkedIn inferred them. And these labels aren't just for ads — they determine what opportunities reach you. Job postings, recruiter outreach, and sponsored content are all filtered through this profile. The inferences are wildly inaccurate, which means the entire system is built on confident guesses. Every person who pays for a LinkedIn ad is bidding on these labels. Every person scrolling LinkedIn is being sorted by them.
The quiet files
These are the files most people would skip over. Login records, security events, endorsements, learning activity, payment receipts. The long tail of tracking.
A timestamped record of every time you've logged in. Combined with IP data, this is a location history.
Every security challenge event — CAPTCHAs, two-factor prompts, suspicious login attempts.
Your LinkedIn Learning activity — every course viewed or completed. But notably, the export now includes four additional files for AI features: LearningCoachMessages.csv, learning_coach_messages.csv (yes, both exist), learning_role_play_messages.csv, and guide_messages.csv. These track your conversations with LinkedIn's AI coaching tools.
Login timestamps + IP addresses = a location history LinkedIn never explicitly asked you to share. The AI coaching files are especially notable: LinkedIn now stores your conversations with their AI tools, which means your career anxieties, skill gaps, and professional insecurities — the things you'd only share with a "coach" — are now rows in a database.
Four date formats, zero consistency
The export itself tells a story: this data was clearly assembled by different teams with zero coordination. Here's what we mean.
Date formats across files
File naming conventions (or lack thereof)
When you request your data, LinkedIn offers a "Basic" export (ready in minutes) and a "Complete" export (takes ~24 hours). The Basic version contains about half the files. Guess which half is missing? Your search history. Your reactions. Your login records. The inferences they've made about you. The ad targeting labels. Your comments. Your shares. All the AI coaching messages. Everything on this page that made you uncomfortable is only in the Complete archive. If you've downloaded your data before and thought "this doesn't seem so bad" — you probably got the Basic.
This isn't theoretical
Three things happened in the last few months that make this archive more than an interesting exercise.
4.3 billion records were found in an exposed database
Nov 2025Cybersecurity researchers discovered an unsecured MongoDB database containing 16 terabytes of professional records scraped from LinkedIn profiles. Names, emails, phone numbers, job roles, work history, education, skills, photos. The data sat exposed on the open internet until researchers flagged it.
LinkedIn started using your data to train AI — and opted you in by default
Nov 2025As of November 2025, LinkedIn updated its privacy policy to use member data to train generative AI models by default. Your posts, comments, reactions, profile information, and feed interactions now feed into Microsoft's AI ecosystem. You can opt out — but anything collected before your opt-out date is already in the training data. And most users were never notified.
Women tested LinkedIn for gender bias. LinkedIn said it doesn't use gender. Their own export says otherwise.
Nov–Dec 2025In the #WearThePants experiment, women changed their LinkedIn gender settings to male and saw dramatic increases in reach — 200% to 818% more impressions. LinkedIn's head of responsible AI stated that their systems "do not use demographic information (such as age, race, or gender) as a signal to determine the visibility of content."
This is one platform.
My LinkedIn Profile.csv contains my Twitter handle, my personal website, and my email address. My Connections.csv includes emails for 116 people in my network. My imported contacts have personal phone numbers and emails going back to 2007. These are cross-platform identifiers — the exact keys a data broker needs to link a LinkedIn profile to Facebook activity, Google searches, Instagram interests, Amazon purchases, and location history.
Every platform has an archive like this one. Most people have never downloaded any of them. Each archive alone is revealing. Linked together, they're a complete portrait of who you are, what you want, what you fear, and what you'll do next.
LinkedIn is just the one that's supposed to be "professional."
Everyone you know, and how
Not just your connections — everyone you follow, every company you follow, every hashtag you follow, and the contacts you imported from your phone or email.
Every connection: name, profile URL, email address, company, position, and exact date connected.
Remember when LinkedIn asked to "find people you know"? These are the contacts you uploaded from your phone or email. They kept them.
Every invitation (with your personal message), plus three separate files for three types of follows — people, companies, and hashtags. Each tracked individually.
Without revealing a single name, this data paints a clear picture: senior creative industry, heavy founder/C-suite network, big spike in 2023–2024 (career transition visible from space). LinkedIn knows your seniority level, your industry, your career trajectory, and exactly when your professional life changed — all from connection metadata.
Your social graph is a relationship map. It reveals who you trust, who you work with, and who influences you. Recruiters pay LinkedIn to see this. Advertisers use it for lookalike targeting. And if this data leaks, it's a roadmap for spear-phishing — "Hey, your colleague Sarah mentioned you'd be interested in this..." LinkedIn also keeps the contacts you imported from your phone years ago, including people who never signed up for LinkedIn.