Short Life and Death of Chrome plugin for LinkedIn
A year ago, I’ve created simple plugin for Google Chrome called “Private Notes”.
The idea was simple: when you are browsing a profile of someone in a social network, a small yellow input appears right below a profile picture. Then you can simply write your private note about this person.
If you are browsing the same profile later, you may see the notes you’ve made before and update them. All notes are synced through your Google account between your computers with Google Chrome.
First version worked with Facebook:
And Twitter:
Export to CSV was also available:
After one year in Chrome Store it had 35+ weekly active users and one of them complained that Facebook integration was broken. So in April 2019 I’ve made the fix in the code and also decided to add one more site, LinkedIn:
The new version worked pretty good. It was also handy to use it as it was autosaving notes as you type and it was convenient to use one common list across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’ve published the updated the plugin in Google Chrome plugin store on April 17, 2019.
I did no promotion for the update but as I understand, users liked the update and the number of weekly users doubled within a month to 70+users.
But in 1 month, on June 24 I’ve got the following email to few of my personal email addresses from LinkedIn Trust and Safety Enforcement, here is the copy-paste:
Dear Mr. Mironichev,
It has come to the attention of LinkedIn’s Trust & Safety Team that your product Private Notes for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook is accessing and copying content from LinkedIn’s website, computer systems, and servers at www.linkedin.com in violation of the LinkedIn User Agreement. Specifically, the Private Notes for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook extension (“Private Notes”) which you offer at the Chrome Web Store, appears to be modifying LinkedIn’s website by inserting a DOM element that creates a new field on a member’s profile page. In addition, Private Notes appears to be scraping member data, including first name and last name, from LinkedIn’s logged-in, password protected website.
LinkedIn has earned its members’ trust by acting vigilantly to keep their data secure and its platform free from fraud and abuse. LinkedIn’s User Agreement, available at https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement, expressly prohibits, among other things, the following:
- Develop, support, or use software, devices, scripts, robots, or any other means or processes (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, or any other technology) to scrape the Services or otherwise copy profiles and other data from the Services;
- Copy, use, disclose or distribute any information obtained from the Services, whether directly or through third parties, without the consent of LinkedIn; and
- Overlay or otherwise modify the Services or their appearance (such as by inserting elements into the Services or removing, covering, or obscuring an advertisement included on the Services).
Private Notes’ unauthorized activities, as described above, violate these provisions. In addition, LinkedIn members who make use of this extension are also in violation. Due to Private Notes’ continued violations of LinkedIn’s User Agreement, LinkedIn hereby revokes Private Notes’ access to LinkedIn’s website, servers, products, and services.
This notice is not intended by us, and should not be construed by you, as a waiver or relinquishment of any of our rights or remedies, all of which we specifically reserve. LinkedIn requires that you and Private Notes immediately comply with LinkedIn’s User Agreement and cease the above activities or disable the Private Notes extension from operating on LinkedIn. Please confirm by June 25, 2019 that Private Notes has complied with these requests. In the event that Private Notes does not comply with LinkedIn’s requests, LinkedIn will have no choice but to take further action to protect its members and website.
Sincerely,
LinkedIn Trust & Safety
I’ve unpublished the plugin from Chrome Store the same day and replied that I’ve removed the plugin:
In the end of the day, it was just a personal project I’ve worked on for fun and I don’t have a will or time to discuss it with LinkedIn.
TL;DR I’ve made small Chrome plugin for writing private notes about people you meet on social networks but LinkedIn requested to take it down (and I did) or they will “take further action”.
