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How to browse LinkedIn profiles anonymously

technologyEdward Kiledjian
Image by Pierre (Rennes) used under Creative Commons License

Image by Pierre (Rennes) used under Creative Commons License

LinkedIn is a critical business tool for many professionals. It can be incredibly useful for research, communication, strategy building and corporate intelligence. 

Social Network privacy is a difficult concept for most users to understand. Social Networks are built on their ability to track you and then use that information to generate money. Facebook does this by leveraging your network to generate custom sticky newsfeeds. LinkedIn uses this information to entice users to "upgrade to premium" to see who has viewed your profile. Obviously it is in their interest to make enabling maximum privacy as confusing and as difficult as possible. If too many people enabled the maximum privacy settings, their networks would become less engaging and sticky, driving down revenues. 

So how can you browse LinkedIn profiles anonymously? Read on my friend...

Go to Account Settings

Click on Privacy & Settings 

Then Select the Profile Tab

Choose "Select what others see when you've viewed their profile"

Now choose what level of privacy you want to enable. In my case, I've left it on the default setting. You can choose "You will be totally anonymous" and voila.