The Brutal Fight to Mine Your Data and Sell It to Your Boss

Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 2017: "Silicon Valley makes billions of dollars peddling personal information, supported by an ecosystem of bit players. One of them, an upstart called HiQ, is going up against LinkedIn in a battle for your lucrative professional identity.

HiQ is a “people analytics” firm that creates software tools for corporate human resources departments. Its Skill Mapper graphically represents the credentials and abilities of a workforce; its Keeper service identifies when employees are at risk of leaving for another job. Both draw the overwhelming majority of their data from a single trove: the material that is posted—with varying degrees of timeliness, detail, accuracy, and self-awareness—by the 500 million people on the social networking site LinkedIn.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 2017: "Silicon Valley makes billions of dollars peddling personal information, supported by an ecosystem of bit players. One of them, an upstart called HiQ, is going up against LinkedIn in a battle for your lucrative professional identity.

HiQ is a “people analytics” firm that creates software tools for corporate human resources departments. Its Skill Mapper graphically represents the credentials and abilities of a workforce; its Keeper service identifies when employees are at risk of leaving for another job. Both draw the overwhelming majority of their data from a single trove: the material that is posted—with varying degrees of timeliness, detail, accuracy, and self-awareness—by the 500 million people on the social networking site LinkedIn.