According to restoreprivacy.com, “On June 22nd, a user of a popular hacker forum advertised data from 700 Million LinkedIn users for sale. The user claims that the complete database contains the personal information of 700 Million LinkedIn users.“
LinkedIn made a corporate statement on June 29, 2021:
Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update.
Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn terms of service. When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable.
For additional information about our policies and how we protect member data from misuse: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/56347/prohibited-software-and-extensions
Reference
- https://restoreprivacy.com/linkedin-data-leak-700-million-users/
- https://news.linkedin.com/2021/june/an-update-from-linkedin