LinkedIn announced today it has updated its terms of service, with the changes taking effect this September 12th. The changes come in part due to LinkedIn opening itself up more to pre-university students with today’s launch of LinkedIn University Pages. Minors who are members will have somewhat different default settings to maintain privacy, and customer support tickets sent in by minors will be routed differently.
If you’re in the US, you can sign up for LinkedIn when you’re 14, but in each country it’s different. In many countries, minors can join at 13; in China it is 18.
As part of the changes, LinkedIn has also updates its privacy policy. The largest changes are that personal information coming in from LinkedIn’s Share button and other plugins is limited to 7 days, and now the privacy policy fully covers any data sharing between your LinkedIn and SlideShare accounts. Read more about the changes at LinkedIn’s blog.
If you’re a privacy advocate, you’ll be happy to know that LinkedIn doesn’t appear (at first glance) to be hiding anything substantial in its new privacy policy. Today’s moves, in fact, seem to indicate a major push towards capturing the pre-professional market and turning tomorrow’s professionals into lifelong LinkedIn participants.