This doesn't follow at all. You could just as well say, "You don't have to be employed to be in a business office, ergo a workplace cannot be a workplace under all conditions."

This is semantic gymnastics around the word "workplace," not a reasoned evaluation of the circumstances or whether it's reasonable to expect workplace-appropriate standards of behavior on LinkedIn.

>You could just as well say, "You don't have to be employed to be in a business office, ergo a workplace cannot be a workplace under all conditions."

False equivalency, the vast majority of people in a business office on a day to day basis are employees of that business office.

LinkedIn is a /recruiting website/. Unemployed people are a key part of it's core demographic.

The guy was using a company account.

That doesn't make the statement "LinkedIn is an extension of the workplace" true.

Acting in a disreputable way while wearing clothing that represents my company could get me fired, but that doesn't make the local supermarket an extension of my workplace just because I walk in there with a company shirt.

If you walk into a supermarket wearing clothing that represents your company, and you say "I am a representative of the company, acting here in my official capacity as that representative, and what I say and do here reflects the policies and positions of the company", then you better believe you'd get busted the same way this guy did.

Which is, metaphorically, what happened here: when using the company account you're not a private citizen in a t-shirt with a logo; you are the company.

>then you better believe you'd get busted the same way this guy did.

Yep, I /totally/ agree with you. Still doesn't make LinkedIn an extension of the workplace.

Please think about what that means for at least one second. For most software engineers, if LinkedIn is an extension of the workplace, then by the wording of their employment contract (which invariably includes IP ownership clauses for everything done in their capacity as an employee), their employer owns all their content on LinkedIn, and could request it any time.

That potentially makes it very hard for software engineers to use LinkedIn on a private account to look for a new job without their boss knowing.

Again, you gloss over the single most important phrase: when using a company account.

Absolutely no-one has expressed a desire to lay claim to your personal LinkedIn account. If you continue to argue that this is about personal rather than company accounts, I will interpret as a sign of explicit bad faith on your part.

See also: apparent authority, the agency law doctrine that deals with the situation you described.