LinkedIn lowers minimum age for membership

As we reported last month, LinkedIn has lowered its minimum age for members, in a bid to encourage high school users to use the site as their pathway into work. It mirrors how Facebook last week began testing ‘Professional Skills‘, which looks like a step into LinkedIn’s online CV territory.

LinkedIn is being very careful to make sure minors are well protected on the social network. Date of birth is hidden if you are under 18, and profiles will not be public or discoverable on search engines like Google or Bing. It also says these users won’t see LinkedIn ads when they are browsing other sites, which suggests the social network disables some tracking cookies for minors. Overall, LinkedIn is ensuring younger users start with the highest privacy settings. Click here to read LinkedIn’s advice for teens.

Here are the new minimum ages for LinkedIn.

• 14 years old: United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, Australia and South Korea
• 16 years old: Netherlands
• 18 years old: China
• 13 years old: All other countries

These changes come as LinkedIn launches University Pages, which serve both as a place for alumni to connect, and as a way for prospective students to check out potential universities. LinkedIn wants to be the place where high school students can think about ‘where they want to go to college, what they want to study, where they want to live and work.’

LinkedIn’s privacy policy has also been updated for all users. It now stores personal and location data for less time, a maximum of seven days.

Read more about LinkedIn

• LinkedIn opening up to high school students
• LinkedIn to put ‘Sponsored Updates’ in your news feed
• iOS 7 to get native LinkedIn app?

[Source: LinkedIn]