LinkedIn’s chief data officer, Igor Perisic, wrote in a blog on the website that it believed its data “should be used in service of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce”.

“Our plan is to achieve this through the creation of the Economic Graph, a digital mapping of the global economy,” he added.

But in light of the problems that befell Facebook when it opened up its data to academic researchers, Perisic also added that the de-identified or aggregate data from LinkedIn would only be available to researchers “in a way that respects the privacy of LinkedIn members”.

Its data will only be available to academics whose proposals have been approved by LinkedIn and the data won’t be retained beyond the scope of the research project.