Why has my LinkedIn Account been suspended?

Good news: your account should have been reinstated by now, according to the latest buzz in the My LinkedIn Power Forum discussion group. That addressed, here's what key LinkedIn developer Duncan Work had to share about the LICM application and LinkedIn:

It looks like a few people's accounts were temporarily suspended for exceeding LinkedIn's limits on page views, so I thought I should explain when we do this.

In order to be able to keep the promises in our Privacy Policy, we detect and stop high page views (high enough to realistically require automated tools) for users who are specifically viewing full profiles of non-connections and search result pages (which contain several mini-profiles). Since we've improved our detection system to be able to detect exactly what kinds of pages are being viewed, we now apply the same thresholds to all users, including people using the LICM tool.

If you're not looking at hundreds or thousands of LinkedIn pages a day, this will never affect you. Also, if you're using the LICM tool to update data on your own connections (which you can now also do in the LinkedIn Outlook toolbar) or if you're using LICM for other housekeeping functions, you also won't be affected by this.

When someone exceeds the high-page-view thresholds, we typically put a temporary restriction on the account and send a message explaining our policy and asking them what they're doing. If it's a first time, we remove the restriction once we get a positive response. This amounts to a handful of people per week.

Here's more background for those who want it:

First, the reason we have this policy is because in the past we noticed that a few LinkedIn users were consistently viewing thousands or even tens of thousands of pages a day, day after day. Since we have no idea what people are doing with the data they're viewing - they could be storing it, combining it with other data, etc. - we had no way of controlling whether the data was being used as we had promised to all LinkedIn users in our privacy policy.

However, when we started to restrict people from high-page-viewing we discovered that many people were using the LICM tool. Arnnei, the creator of this tool, had previously talked to us about allowing use of the LICM tool and we agreed that it would be OK as long as it wasn't being used to violate LinkedIn's privacy policies. We have since then worked closely with Arnnei to make sure this is the case and he's been extremely helpful and cooperative.

It used to be that the LICM tool would only permit users to view and store data on their own connections. Since many LICM members have more than 1000 connections and since in addition they were using LICM for other kinds of housekeeping, that meant that many of them were appearing on our old high page view report and we didn't know how to tell what they were really doing. So, this made it more difficult, but we have tried to accommodate legitimate uses of the LICM tool.

More recently we've improved our high page view detection so that it can now tell the difference between different kinds of pages. The pages that we most want to bring under control are full profile pages and mini-profiles in search results pages. So we now stop people when they exceed basic thresholds for viewing those pages on a daily and cumulative basis. The daily threshold for these types of pages is now approximately 1000 per day - with also a cumulative cap over a longer period. These thresholds are subject to some algorithmic variations and also subject to change when needed. Since we now have better detection, we now treat LICM users the same as all users; that is, we apply the same thresholds to everyone.

Thanks for that clarification, Duncan. As a LinkedIn user, I'm quite appreciative that you're putting effort into preventing spammers from spidering the database and sending out targeted junk to everyone.