LinkedIn has announced the roll out of three security and privacy tools to better protect user sessions, and ensure that account changes are recognised.
In a blog, Madhu Gupta, head of security, privacy and customer service products at LinkedIn, said that the three options would give members “as much choice and control as possible over your account and data”.
The first addition will offer a single page to see everywhere you’re signed in to LinkedIn, and manage those sessions in your settings. The second is the ability to export all of LinkedIn data with one click, while will let you see all the data LinkedIn has stored on your account, including your updates, activity, IP records, searches and more.
Finally, a new set of information will show security related changes to your account, such as a password change, that gives more insight into when and where the account change took place, including the date and time and details on the device the device the changes were made on such as the browser it was running, the Operating System (OS), IP address, and approximate physical location.
Gupta said: “We are in the process of rolling these three new tools out globally now and encourage you to take a look at your settings today to see two of these new tools. It’s also a good opportunity to remind yourself of all your settings and make sure they are right for how you are using LinkedIn now. All of these changes are part of our commitment to put our members first. With these updates, we hope you can feel confident about who owns your content and data on LinkedIn: you.”
Brian Honan, CEO of BH Consulting, told IT Security Guru that this was an interesting and welcome move by LinkedIn. “It does give a lot of control and transparency to users over their account and access to it,” he said. “It will be interesting to see how well LinkedIn make users aware of these features and indeed how much users will use them.”
Security analyst Graham Cluley told IT Security Guru that he also felt that this was a welcome move, and it sounded like the sort of features that a site like LinkedIn should have.
“These sort of features exist on many web email accounts for instance, but the majority of people never really check them and may only check when there has been suspicious activity, but it may be nice to have the ability to tell when you have been logged into four computers for a week or so,” he said.
“I think we can only be positive about it; LinkedIn has had a chequered history regarding how it has used user’s data and in this instance it is a tick for them.” Cluley also recommended users switch on two-factor authentication, which was introduced in June 2013.
