LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform, with over 700 million members. As a professional networking site, LinkedIn encourages you to share details about your work experience, education, skills, and contact information. However, there may be times when you want to limit who can see your personal contact details like your email address and phone number. In this article, we will go over different ways to hide or limit access to your email and phone number on your LinkedIn profile.
Why Would You Want to Hide Your Contact Info?
Here are some common reasons why you may want to hide your email and phone number on LinkedIn:
- Avoid unwanted solicitation: Making your email and phone number public means anyone can contact you directly without your consent. This opens you up to unsolicited outreach from salespeople, recruiters, marketers, and anyone else who comes across your profile.
- Maintain privacy: Even if you’re open to networking, you may not want just anyone to have your personal contact details. Hiding your info allows you to control who you share it with.
- Prevent spam: Public contact info could mean your inbox and voicemail get overrun with spam messages.
- Manage inbound interest: If your profile is getting a lot of attention, limiting your contact details allows you to vet opportunities and avoid being overwhelmed.
- Avoid identity theft: While rare, public contact info could potentially expose you to cybercrime like phishing attempts.
The ability to control access to your contact information is an important way to protect your privacy and security on LinkedIn.
How to Hide Your Email on LinkedIn
Here are step-by-step instructions to remove or hide your email address from your LinkedIn profile:
- Go to your profile page and click “Edit public profile & URL” located just below your profile photo and name.
- Find the Contact Info section and click the “Pencil” icon to edit it.
- Delete your email address from the Email field.
- Optional: Add a note in the Email field explaining that you prefer to be contacted through LinkedIn messaging for privacy reasons.
- Click Save at the bottom of the section.
Once you save the changes, your email will no longer be visible on your public profile to people who are not connected to you. However, you can still receive LinkedIn messages even with a hidden email.
Other Ways to Limit Email Visibility
In addition to completely hiding your email, LinkedIn offers these options to limit visibility:
- Connections only: Only your 1st-degree connections will see your email address.
- Anyone with auth: Anyone logged into a LinkedIn account can view your email, but it’s not public to search engines.
To adjust this:
- Go to your profile and click Edit Contact Info.
- Change the Email visibility dropdown to your desired setting.
This allows you to share your email with your network while avoiding making it public to the whole internet.
How to Hide Your Phone Number on LinkedIn
Hiding your phone number works the same way:
- Edit your Contact Info section.
- Delete your phone number from the Phone field.
- Optional: Add a note that you prefer to be contacted through LinkedIn messaging.
- Save the changes.
Your phone number will now be removed from your public profile. You can also limit visibility to only connections or those logged into LinkedIn accounts.
Other Tips for Restricting Your Phone Number
- Use your office phone number rather than your personal cell number if you need to include a phone.
- List only your area code instead of full phone number.
- Use LinkedIn’s Do Not Solicit setting: Profile > Privacy & Settings > Communications > Set preferences to avoid unsolicited outreach.
Pros and Cons of Hiding Contact Info on LinkedIn
Before deciding to hide your email and phone number, consider these potential pros and cons:
Pros
- More control over unsolicited contact
- Reduced risk of spam
- Increased privacy and security
- Ability to vet opportunities on your terms
- Peace of mind from protecting personal details
Cons
- Harder for interested parties to contact you
- Could miss out on relevant opportunities
- Appears aloof or disengaged if email and phone hidden
- Less able to build deeper connections
In most cases, the benefits of increased privacy and control outweigh the downsides. But assess your own priorities and needs when deciding what contact information to share publicly.
Other Ways to Maintain Privacy on LinkedIn
In addition to adjusting your contact details visibility, here are some other tips for keeping your profile private:
- Customize your public profile URL to make it more generic.
- Use the site’s Do Not Broadcast setting so your connections are not notified when you change jobs.
- Review all apps and services connected to your profile that can access profile data.
- Disable search engine indexing of your public profile in settings.
- Block unwanted connections. You can also report or flag inappropriate communications.
Regularly checking your privacy settings and limiting public information allows you to maximize the benefits of LinkedIn while protecting personal details.
Conclusion
While sharing some contact details can facilitate networking, hiding your email address and phone number on LinkedIn is recommended to avoid unwanted solicitation. The platform makes it simple to remove this sensitive information from your public profile. Just edit the contact info section and delete the details you want to hide.
With a few adjustments to your profile settings, you can more selectively share your email and number only with your trusted connections. This gives you greater control over who can reach out to you directly.
Balancing the risks and rewards of sharing personal data is key on any social media platform. But following LinkedIn’s privacy features allows you to build your professional network and brand while still maintaining control over your contact information.