Limitations to storing profile data retrieved from LinkedIn API

2
votes

Is it allowed to store a profile's company name as provided by LinkedIn Profile API?

The Terms of Use refer to certain limitations when it comes to storing retrieved data and it's not clear to me whether this particular datum is allowed or not.

First, when they refer to Profile Data that can be stored only a few fields are mentioned (name, photo, headline, contact information, experience, education, summary, and location); is that meant to be a comprehensive list?

And second, they explicitly exclude companies but I'm not sure whether they refer to data provided by the Profile API (positions in Basic Profile Fields) or data retrieved from the Profile Company API.

Any advice?

References to the Terms of Use

Introduction / Scope and Intent / Self-Service Program

You cannot use our self-service program [...], if your Application [...] will store or export any data from LinkedIn other than a LinkedIn member’s profile data (name, photo, headline, contact information, experience, education, summary, and location). [...]

And:

Act Professionally / Store Content Only As Allowed / Member Profile Data

You may store a user’s Profile Data if you have the consent of the user to do so [...]. “Profile Data” means the name, photo, headline, contact information, experience, education, summary, and location of a LinkedIn member. Profile Data excludes connections, network updates, job listings, groups, companies, and any other Content.

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linkedin

1 Answers

1
votes

As you've referenced from the Terms of Use, member profile data contains the following pieces of information:

  • Name
  • Photo
  • Headline
  • Contact Information
  • Experience
  • Education
  • Summary
  • Location

And it excludes:

  • Connections
  • Network Updates
  • Job Listings
  • Groups
  • Companies
  • Other Content

Looking at these lists, we can take Experience as it's used on LinkedIn to refer to the role held by the user at a company, and so you would naturally have access to the name of the company.

The Platform Guidelines, point 3.2:

[..] You may only store the profile of that person, not the profile data of that person's connections, network updates, or other network information.

Looking at the API documentation for Profile Fields, in the sub-sections referring to Positions and Company, you can see that:

Positions are structured objects returned as part of profile.

Including the following fields:

  • Job title
  • Summary
  • Company

Company is a structured object returned as part of profile.

Not used directly with people calls, but used in position calls.

Including the following fields:

  • Company name
  • Company industry

So you should be fine to use this information.