Scanning slowly and safely: pacing, budgets and the honest risk

Six Degrees can show you who your connections know, but only if it can read their connection lists. LinkedIn's own data export doesn't include them: it lists the people you're connected to, and nobody else. So the app has an optional scanner that reads them from LinkedIn, in a Chrome window you sign into yourself.

This post is about how that scanner behaves, and why. Start with the part that matters most.

The risk, in plain words

Automating LinkedIn may break its User Agreement, and LinkedIn can restrict accounts that do it. The scanner reads slowly, keeps to a budget and stops at the first push-back, but the risk is yours.

Accounts have been restricted for this, and no amount of pacing makes the risk zero. That's why scanning is optional, and why the two other ways in carry no risk at all:

• The sample network: 150 invented connections and the 598 people they know, built into the app, for trying every view.
• LinkedIn's own export: Settings & Privacy → Data privacy → Get a copy of your data → Connections. It's read on your computer and shows the people you know, though not who they know.

If you do scan, everything below is there to keep it slow, visible and easy to stop.

You sign in, not the app

The scanner drives your own installed Google Chrome, with a profile of its own that the app keeps in its data folder. You sign into LinkedIn in that window yourself, once. The app never asks for, sees or stores your password. That signed-in profile is the one thing in the data folder that grants access to your account, so the app never puts it into a copy of your network, and the docs ask you never to sync or share it.

A budget, not a race

Every page of someone's connections is a LinkedIn search, and every circle scan opens their profile once. The scanner counts both, against limits you set on the Scan page:

• Searches: 50 a day and 250 a month by default. The month follows LinkedIn's own, from midnight Pacific time on the 1st.
• Profile views: 50 a day by default, and at least 60 seconds between any two, even across separate scans. There's no "no limit" choice.

When a budget is used, a scan saves what it read and stops. The next one carries on from the same page. Picking more than 100 searches a day, or no monthly cap, makes the page ask first, and a note stays under the budget, with a button back to 50 and 250, for as long as it's that high.

Slow on purpose

Between the budgets, the pacing is deliberately unhurried:

• 20 seconds before each page of results, and a minute more after every 10 pages;
• about two minutes between one person's circle and the next;
• so a long list can take around 55 minutes for one person.

The waits are fixed. They're never randomised to look like a person: the scanner doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't. It reads each list to the end by default (or 10, 25 or 50 pages if you choose), saves every 10 pages, and a read that stops carries on from the same page next time. A Paused list on the Scan page shows every circle with more to read, with Resume beside each.

It stops at the first push-back

The scanner reads what's on the page, and it stops the moment LinkedIn pushes back: a page that won't open, an unusual-activity warning, restricted viewing, the search limit, a security check or a sign-in wall. It saves what it had read, and keeps a copy of what the page said in the data folder, so you can see exactly what happened.

Then a cooldown lock blocks anything that searches, for a day, or until the 1st for the monthly limit. The Scan page shows when it lifts, and you can lift it early if you choose.

And a scanner that can't read its page says so. It never reports "you have no connections" because a page failed to load.

Always visible

While a scan runs, a status bar sits under the tabs on every page: what's running and for whom, how far it's got, today's searches against your daily budget (green, then amber past 60%, red past 90%), what it's doing right now (for example, the wait before the next profile), and Stop. Stop saves what was read.

The experimental parts

Two newer options are marked experimental on the Scan page, and off by default:

• All-day pacing (Auto-Bridge), with an Auto scan button once it's ticked. Up to 10 pages in a sitting, then a 45-minute rest; searches only between 09:00 and 19:00 on your computer's clock; and at the daily budget it waits for the budget to free up instead of stopping. A monthly limit or a cooldown still stops it. It hasn't yet been tried on a live account, which is why it's labelled the way it is.
• Hide the Chrome window while scanning. Scans run without a window popping up; the status bar and Stop still work, and signing in always opens the window. The Scan page spells out the risks beside the box: a hidden Chrome is easier for LinkedIn to tell apart from a person, so it may make a warning or restriction more likely, and if LinkedIn asks you to prove it's you, you won't see it, so the scan stops instead of waiting. It changes nothing about pacing or budgets.

Why go to this trouble?

Because the people your connections know are the most useful part of your network, and the one part no official export contains. The scanner exists to get that part, for your own use, on your own computer, as gently as possible, with the risk said out loud rather than buried.

The full details, down to what each page of the scanner reads, are in docs/SCRAPING.md.