LinkedIn opens up data to researchers to learn about the job market

LinkedIn will open up its data to academic researchers for the purpose of better understanding the labor market and the economy, Bloomberg reports. The company is inviting academics to submit study proposals that in some way involve analytics, economics or artificial intelligence and it will select projects early next year. If chosen, researchers will then get access to "one of the largest and most robust datasets of professional and economic networks," according to LinkedIn Chief Data Officer Igor Perisic. In a post-Cambridge Analytica world, giving researchers access to troves of user data may not seem like the best plan. But LinkedIn has put a number of protections in place to ensure its users' privacy isn't violated.