Contact & About

SIGNAL//NOISE started from a practical irritation: every "best LinkedIn alternative" list on the first page of Google is ranked by affiliate economics, not by any serious assessment of what happens to your data on each platform. That gap widened further when LinkedIn was fined €310 million by the Irish DPC in October 2024 and started licensing user data to AI training partners. We wanted a reference that treated data practices as a first-class evaluation criterion, not a checkbox near the end of the article.

So we built one. Every page of this site is written by people who've used every platform we audit, read the relevant privacy policies closely enough to find the footnotes, and tracked the regulatory actions and breach disclosures as they've happened.

Editorial standards

No affiliate links. If you click through to LinkedIn or Xing from here, it's a plain link. We earn nothing.
No paid placements. No platform has bought inclusion, favorable scoring, or exclusion. If a platform is missing, it's because we haven't audited it yet.
No sponsored content. If we ever introduce sponsored coverage, it will be labeled unambiguously, kept out of the audit-scoring process, and disclosed in the monthly log.
Corrections posted openly. Every factual error we make gets a correction at the top of the affected page and a note in the next newsletter.
Scheduled re-audits. Platforms change. We re-verify every audited page at least twice a year, and issue out-of-cycle updates when something material shifts.

What we don't cover

We don't audit automated-application tools, "resume spam" engines, or browser-extension LinkedIn automators. These products exist, they produce short-term metrics for the user, and — in our editorial judgment — their aggregate effect on the hiring ecosystem is net-negative. Other publications cover them if that's what you're looking for.

We also don't cover recruiting CRMs or sales automation tools. Those are enterprise-software categories with their own trade press; the audiences overlap with ours but the analytical framework is different.

Contact addresses

All email goes to humans. We batch-respond, usually within a week, sometimes faster:

General / feedback → [email protected]
Corrections → [email protected] (include the URL and the specific fix)
Privacy / data requests → [email protected]
Press / research → [email protected]
Tip line (for platform-insiders) → [email protected]. Pseudonymous submissions welcomed. Named attribution only with your explicit written consent.

If you work at one of the platforms we cover

We want to hear from you. Anonymously if you prefer. Particularly interested in: actual data-retention schedules (as opposed to policy language), internal product plans that affect user privacy before they ship, and anything that contradicts our public audits. We verify before publishing, we protect sources, and we don't burn people who talk to us.

If it changes what users should know, publish it. If we got it wrong, fix it. Repeat.