LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 660 million users worldwide. It allows members to create professional profiles, connect with other professionals, search for jobs, publish articles, and more. LinkedIn offers several premium subscription options that provide additional features beyond the basic free account. One common question around LinkedIn’s premium offerings is whether they allow members to keep their profiles and activity more private than on a standard free account.
An overview of LinkedIn’s premium tiers
LinkedIn currently offers three paid subscription tiers:
- Premium Career – $29.99/month
- Premium Business – $49.99/month
- Sales Navigator – $79.99/month
Each tier builds on the features of the previous one and offers additional benefits. Here is a quick rundown of what’s included with each premium offering:
Premium Career
– See who’s viewed your profile
– Get insights on how you compare to other applicants on jobs
– Access premium courses and expert coaching
– Get unlimited InMail messages
Premium Business
– Includes all Premium Career benefits
– Search people outside your network
– See more profiles when you search
– Access advanced filters and custom searches
– Get insights on hiring trends and salary data
Sales Navigator
– Includes all Premium Business benefits
– Advanced lead and account search
– TeamLink collaboration tools
– Custom sales cadences
– Contact management and list building
– Sales analytics and alerts
Now that we’ve covered the basics of LinkedIn’s premium tiers, let’s look specifically at how they impact profile visibility and privacy settings.
Does Premium limit profile visibility?
One of the most common reasons people upgrade to LinkedIn Premium is to gain more control over their profile visibility. However, Premium does not directly let you hide your profile or remove yourself from search results. All members, whether they are on free or paid accounts, appear in LinkedIn’s general search directory.
That said, Premium does offer tools to customize what parts of your profile are visible to different audiences:
- You can turn on viewing restrictions to limit profile views to only people within your network.
- Premium allows you to manage visibility for each section of your profile individually, like work experience, education, skills, etc.
- You can hide your public profile from search engines using the “Make my public profile visible only to people on LinkedIn” privacy setting.
So in summary, Premium doesn’t let you remove yourself from LinkedIn entirely or keep your profile fully private. But it does provide more granular controls over what information is visible and to whom. The visibility restrictions can help limit random people or search engines from accessing parts of your profile.
Does Premium hide your activity and connections?
Beyond profile visibility, Premium also allows you to limit the visibility of some of your account activity and connections:
- With Premium, you can turn on a “Blocked Profiles” setting that removes selected connections from seeing your activity updates and new connections.
- The “Your Dashboard & Activity Broadcasts” privacy setting lets you limit status updates to only your connections or a customized list.
- Premium members can browse member profiles anonymously without the viewed members receiving a notification.
So again, while Premium doesn’t completely hide all of your activity and connections, it does give you tools to selectively limit their visibility. This can be helpful for keeping certain professional connections from seeing your full network or activity details.
Should you upgrade to Premium for more privacy?
Here are some key considerations on whether Premium is worth it strictly for increased privacy:
- Premium is most useful if you want to limit visibility from recruiters, certain colleagues, or companies you’re following but not ready to actively job search with.
- The privacy controls don’t completely hide your information, so Premium likely isn’t necessary if you just want to avoid random spam connection requests.
- Free accounts already let you fully customize visibility for your contact info and demographics, so Premium isn’t essential for hiding those basic details.
- You can get some of the profile customization benefits using free accounts if you’re strategic and selective about what information you add.
- For many users, the increased search visibility and networking opportunities on LinkedIn outweigh the small privacy gains from Premium.
In general, Premium is most valuable for privacy if you have specific professional contacts or companies you wish to exclude from seeing your full profile and activity stream. For some job seekers and professionals, the privacy controls can be worth the monthly price. But for others, LinkedIn’s free account options provide sufficient profile and activity privacy.
Other privacy settings available to all members
It’s important to remember that all LinkedIn members, whether free or premium, have access to core privacy controls through their account settings:
- You can customize your profile visibility settings for items like your photo, city/region, industry, zip code, birthday, interests, and public profile.
- Visibility of your education, work experience, volunteer experience, skills, certifications, and more can be adjusted or turned off completely.
- Ad preferences allow you to limit the types of targeted ads you see.
- Email and notification settings let you control messages from LinkedIn and reduce unsolicited outreach.
- You can block specific members from interacting with your profile and viewing your activity.
So before paying for Premium, be sure to check your main account settings and adjust visibility for sections that don’t need to be public. Tighten up the default openness as makes sense for your professional situation and comfort level.
Conclusion
In summary, LinkedIn Premium provides additional privacy controls beyond the free account settings, but does not fully hide your profile or activity on the platform. Premium is best suited for users who need to selectively limit visibility from recruiters, certain connections, or companies researching them. But the core account settings on free accounts still allow you to customize quite a bit regarding what is publicly visible.
For many professionals, the free account privacy options are sufficient, and the expanded networking and search visibility of the open platform outweigh the marginal privacy gains from Premium. But for others, the ability to restrict certain sections and actions is worth the monthly fee. Consider your specific circumstances and career goals to decide if LinkedIn Premium’s privacy features are a useful investment for you.