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Posted by nicksergeant 1 day ago

Show HN: Jobs by Referral: Find jobs in your LinkedIn network(jobsbyreferral.com)
I have some friends who were laid off and are on the job hunt. We were all quite surprised to learn that LinkedIn does not have a "view jobs only at companies where I have connections", so I built https://jobsbyreferral.com/

It's powered by https://rapidapi.com/letscrape-6bRBa3QguO5/api/jsearch, which is a little pricey, so I'm trying to decide whether to put more effort into the project (I'd have to charge _something_ to offset the costs).

163 points | 62 commentspage 2
bsoles 1 day ago|
I've read the instructions steps as:

1. Download your entire LinkedIn data.

2. Give us your entire LinkedIn data.

The "larger" data they are asking for includes "... connections, verifications, contacts, account history, and information we infer about you based on your profile and activity ..."

nicksergeant 1 day ago||
We've added some privacy details here: https://jobsbyreferral.com/privacy.

You absolutely do not need to upload all of your data. Just a CSV in the format we need (which is now updated on the homepage as well).

JoeDohn 1 day ago||
[flagged]
nicksergeant 1 day ago||
Honest question: for what? The data you export from LinkedIn is yours. From their "Download my data" section:

> Download my data > Your LinkedIn data belongs to you, and you can download an archive any time or view the rich media you have uploaded.

What you choose to upload to JobsByReferral.com is entirely up to you - you don't need to upload the entire ZIP. You can upload the Connections.csv-formatted file after you review it. You could also obfuscate person names if you'd like, before uploading.

We also do nothing with your data. You can verify the app does not send your data to any backend endpoints _except_ for company name (so that we can find jobs at that company).

JoeDohn 18 hours ago||
I am not calling for it nor wishing for it, but they will argue the 'data usage bypass' that leads to a loss for them (instead 'clicking'/'viewing' jobs on sh*t linkedin website, users are using JobsByReferral).

But I guess they won't come to you right away, if you get some traction than you bet they will (even if from legal point of view it's not a clear path for a win)

nicksergeant 17 hours ago||
Anyone can threaten legal action for anything, so you're not wrong, but JSearch also returns LinkedIn jobs so the traffic is headed right back to them anyway.
toyg 1 day ago|
The feature is interesting and I'm sure you're in good faith, but you're effectively doing LinkedIn-scraping, just outsourced to your users. Why not use the official API?

(The GDPR implications of this service are also significant. Being in the US does not exempt you from observing that if any of your records are from European users.)

nicksergeant 1 day ago||
LinkedIn's API is pretty locked down to partners, which you must apply for. There's also no documented API to retrieve connections.

The approach we've taken here is that you upload data that you're comfortable uploading. You don't have to upload your entire LinkedIn ZIP archive -- you can just upload the Connections.csv file (which you can review before you upload).

shados 1 day ago|||
Assuming they don't have an EU presence of some sort, EU law doesn't apply to them.

Now if they want to open up shop in the EU, or use a payment processor to charge money that has EU presence, things change.

toyg 1 day ago||
> Assuming they don't have an EU presence of some sort, EU law doesn't apply to them.

That's not correct. If they handle EU people's data, they are responsible for it and can still be fined. Obviously this cannot be enforced if they never visit and have no assets in the EU.

shados 1 day ago||
Its correct purely because of jurisdiction. EU laws don't apply for people with no presence in the EU, unless there was some kind of treaty where one country agrees to enforce another's.

That's just how laws, any law, works. The EU can "fine" all they want but it would be entirely symbolic.

That's like if US restaurants had to enforce EU food safety laws when on US soil because a EU citizen is eating there.

Fortunatelly, unlike US laws, GDPR, by virtue of being EU law, is actually readable by normal human beings, so its fairly straightforward:

https://gdpr.eu/article-3-requirements-of-handling-personal-...

toyg 1 day ago||
Yes, and "the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union" absolutely applies to examining activity of LinkedIn users from the EU.

As for jurisdiction in general: the US routinely jails people for activities that took place outside the US, as soon as they set foot on US soil - occasionally even when they don't even do that (Kim Dotcom). European convictions for civil matters will not result in an arrest warrant, but can result in financial penalties and confiscations applied to anything that has to go through Europe in one way or the other.

The limits of enforcement, in the internet era, are becoming mostly practical rather than theoretical. Which is interesting and poses a number of new, unanswered questions. Simply speaking, one cannot just wave away any law simply because they don't live in this or that place anymore.

shados 1 day ago||
Yup, but Article 3 point 2.a has a fairly strict definition, where for an entity outside of the US to be considered as "offering service" to EU members requires some kind of strict ties. The de facto examples is offering a product by specifically mentioning payment in Euro, or having presence on an domain with a top level TLD of a member state. If there's no ties that shows the offering is made to EU members, it doesn't apply.

Very very little tie is required (eg: just having one employee in the EU in a 50,000 people org would do it right there), but the law has been fairly consistently interpreted as such.

I get where you're coming from, but this isn't a if or but or theoretical. Its just how GDPR gets applied. I probably confused things by trying to introduce poor analogies, when the law itself is fairly clearly interpreted a specific way.

nicksergeant 1 day ago||
Answering your GDPR question: we use cookie-less analytics with https://usefathom.com/ and we do not pass user data to the backend endpoints, which you can verify by viewing the network calls. When you upload the ZIP or CSV the extraction/parsing happens entirely client-side, and then we use auto-generated IDs to map connection data from the JSearch API response to the client-side stored connection data.
toyg 1 day ago||
That's good, you might want to write that somewhere - even just to assuage people's worries in general.
nicksergeant 1 day ago||
Yep, done at https://jobsbyreferral.com/privacy.