Your ex may be stalking you on LinkedIn

Branda Statman has had some "scary times" on LinkedIn. Not scary in terms of worrying about her safety — scary in terms of embarrassment. Statman, a brand manager who lives in Phoenix, has scoped out exes or potential partners on the platform more than once without switching to private browsing mode, forgetting they'd be notified. A couple of guys have called her out on it, which she's been able to spin as due diligence in modern-day dating. A tougher one to explain away: when her mom took a look at a potential suitor's profile a couple of years ago. "Sometimes, I overshare with my mom," Statman, 25, says. When the guy brought it up, she claimed she'd been browsing on her mom's phone for whatever reason. That was, of course, a lie. "It was totally just my mom looking and stalking," she says.

Snooping on an ex or love interest on social media is a tale as old as time — or, rather, as old as Facebook. Plenty of us have been tempted to see what a former fling is up to on Instagram. But most of the time, those platforms don't rat you out (assuming your finger doesn't slip on the like button).

LinkedIn is, in theory, a different animal — a professional space, focused on work, branding, and self-promotion. LinkedIn is for labor, not love. But it's moving into more intimate territory as the lines between the personal and the professional blur, turning a job platform into a place where scorned lovers are lurking. Because LinkedIn ties visibility to opportunity, users are forced to strike a delicate balance between maximizing professional exposure and maintaining personal privacy.

In recent weeks, I spoke with more than a dozen people about their LinkedIn stalking stories, which ranged from hilarious to harrowing. I heard from one woman who'd accidentally sent their ex-mother-in-law a LinkedIn connection request after a divorce. I spoke with a man who caught his cheating ex checking out his profile on his birthday. One woman noticed an ex from nearly a decade ago leave a nasty comment on one of her posts, joking that he'd "take the train" rather than sit next to her on an airplane. Another recalled using LinkedIn in Brooklyn in the 2010s to check if all those Tinder guys who said they worked at Vice actually did.

Luckily for Statman, her story is on the humorous side. The guy her mom looked at ghosted her after a couple of months of dating (not because of the LinkedIn incident). A couple of years later, he texted to apologize for disappearing and told her he was glad to see she was doing well — he'd seen her on LinkedIn. "It goes both ways sometimes," she says.

They talked about rekindling their short-lived romance. He ghosted again, but he still follows her on LinkedIn.

It's normal to wonder about figures from the past, and most people are doing their espionage in good fun. But it can be mortifying if someone realizes you're doing some light cybermonitoring, and it's jarring when you catch someone keeping an eye on you. It's hard to move on from a partner when you're still in each other's online faces.

LinkedIn has a freemium model — you can create a profile and access many of its features without charge, but if you want extras, you often have to pony up. At the unpaid level, there's a trade-off: users can see some information about who's looked at their profile, but only if they allow others to see when they've done the same. Higher-tiered versions allow users to browse in incognito mode, meaning people don't see when they've poked around their page. The result is a web of spies and spy-catchers who pay for varying levels of anonymity.

Like many breakups, Dakota Rae Lowe's separation from her recent ex was messy, and the drama spilled out onto LinkedIn, where both have formidable presences. He posted a mirror selfie on the platform, and she, finding it cringy, posted a subtweet about it, saying if she ever did the same, "please report me." Lowe, 30, who works in advertising in New York, still catches her ex "shamelessly viewing" her profile, even though they split months ago. "Can he not afford Premium?" she says, referring to the paid invisible-browsing tier. "I pay for Premium, because I'm not going to be embarrassed like that."

Others have had similar experiences. When a short-lived relationship petered out in 2022, Kevin Grunewald, now 40, thought things ended on relatively amicable terms — like a lot of relationships, it didn't quite work. But then the Texas-based recruiter noticed the woman he'd dated was viewing his LinkedIn profile almost daily, "it was part of her morning ritual, I guess," he says. She began liking his posts and messaging him, and he finally had to put his foot down after she popped by his house a few times, "I think she blocked me," he says, "which I'm kind of happy about."

Gina Gacad, a 31-year-old communications professional in New York, noticed the mother of her college boyfriend lurking on her profile years after they broke up — and around the time she'd heard he was seeing someone new. "I just wonder if they were trying to size up the new girlfriend," she says. (A running theme in my conversations was that parents are often the problem. Less digitally savvy — and digitally bashful — they're the ones searching without abandon on LinkedIn.)

To be sure, Gacad isn't above some LinkedIn prowling of her own. Another ex belittled her about her job, and when his employer had layoffs, she went to his LinkedIn to see if he was on the chopping block. "He was let go, which was unfortunate, but also he was being a dick," she says. She's not worried about former paramours returning the favor, either. "I think when a guy would wrong me, or someone would wrong me, LinkedIn was the place where I would validate myself."

This is a recurring theme among the people I spoke to: Not everyone is taken aback to see someone from the past poking around in their business-related business. Many are proud of their professional accomplishments, and they're happy for others to see them.

For some people, LinkedIn lurking doesn't just feel awkward or validating — it feels threatening. People often share a lot of specific information about themselves on LinkedIn, including their location and workplace. LinkedIn comes with a privacy tax that some people may not want to pay. At the same time, being invisible may come with another tax — lost job opportunities.

Soon after she moved to Spain in 2023, Amanda Brooks, 30, met a guy on Hinge whom she quickly realized wasn't right for her. She blocked him on social media after he wouldn't take no for an answer to his request for a second date. A year later, he followed her on LinkedIn and began liking her posts and regularly checking her profile. So she blocked him there, too. "Crazy stuff," she says. She's not super worried about the man anymore, but it has made her rethink her approach to the internet, including LinkedIn. "You can kind of get comfortable," she says.

RT, whom I agreed to grant anonymity for this story to protect her privacy, can't seem to shake her former partner's shadow. They ended things in 2020, after which he haunted her for a year, including waiting outside her home and confronting her father at his workplace. He also threatened to call her employer and have her fired for smoking marijuana. RT, who is in her 30s, is now happily married and lives abroad, but a couple of months ago, she noticed her ex's father was looking at her LinkedIn profile. "His dad is retired, so there's not really a reason for him to be on there," she says.

She's blocked her ex everywhere, lives thousands of miles away, and still, the concern about what he might see holds her back, which is especially detrimental given that she's a corporate recruiter. "It does have me kind of wary of posting on there," she says. "Who knows what other family members might try to look? Or other people he might know?"

DA, who I also granted anonymity, echoes the sentiment. She's currently on the job market and wonders if limiting the information on her LinkedIn profile to avoid an ex's surveillance will hurt her prospects. "There's this huge push for people to be LinkedIn influencers and everything to be noticed by employers, and that's been really hard for me," she says. "It's not like I'm afraid of being judged for putting myself out there, I'm afraid of being stalked and this guy having too much information."

LinkedIn declined to comment for this story.

If you're a LinkedIn user, you may have noticed that LinkedIn is weird now. Gone are the days when its main purpose was to prove to prospective employers that you were not lying on your résumé. Now, everyone's supposed to be some sort of #Linkedinfluencer — there's a nudge for people to be not just users but creators. It fosters a sense that if you're not shouting about your most minuscule work wins from the rooftops, you're failing.

It's a tough spot: When the working world expects so much exposure, especially in a labor market as stagnant as this, where do you draw the line? There's no good way to explain to your boss — let alone your potential boss — that you'd rather not be posting front-facing videos on LinkedIn because some woman you went out with a decade ago keeps liking them.

"We've all been socialized to think that putting yourself out there is a route to potential success and career windfall, but at the same time, putting yourself out there opens you up to risks of hyper visibility," says Brooke Erin Duffy, a social media researcher and associate professor at Cornell University.

Rosanna Bellini, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at NYU who researches how technology impacts stalking and intimate partner violence, says that on many social media platforms, such as Instagram, users tend to be quite well-versed in their visibility and privacy settings. They can close direct messages, set their profiles to private, and so on. With LinkedIn, it's more complicated.

"What's really unusual about LinkedIn is that you don't have these fine-grained elements of control," she says.

What's more, it's seen as a "bit of a faux pas" if you leave off specific information from your LinkedIn, Bellini says. "On LinkedIn, everything's pretty location-based," she says. Recruiters want to know where people are, and employers increasingly want to ensure they can come into the office. "There's an enormous amount of pressure on individuals to be as visible as they possibly can to be recruitable," meaning any missing piece of information directly affects employability.

It probably goes without saying that looking up your ex, whether on social media or not, is often not a great idea. Research shows that keeping tabs on a former partner post-breakup heightens distress, increases jealousy, and hinders recovery. Looking up the former lovers of your current partner is bad for you, too. And if the person doing the snooping is currently in a relationship — which was the case with many of the people I spoke with — that's a red flag.

Jaime Bronstein, a licensed clinical social worker and relationship therapist, tells me a lot of it boils down to intent. "If you're going to do a reachout, it's just a way to gather some information in an innocent way," she says. If you're in a relationship but find yourself checking in on old flames, it may be time to "start asking yourself questions about are you happy?" After all, it's a little strange to be LinkedIning your high school girlfriend with your wife in the other room. And if the other person ended things or cut contact, "no message is a message," she says.

For some, the possibility of an emotional setback is enough to keep them away. Holly Benjamin, a 32-year-old marketer from Boston, recently considered looking up an ex from over a decade ago on LinkedIn. Things ended poorly — with a restraining order — and she's worried that if she does take a look and he looks in return, it could send her into a "yearlong spiral." "It's so natural to be curious about where people ended up, but LinkedIn is the only platform where that curiosity can feel a little risky," she says. "A neutral action becomes something that has a lot more thought behind it."

Not all LinkedIn former lover stakeouts have a bad ending — indeed, it can be quite the opposite. That's what happened to Lisette Hall, a 42-year-old marketer in Chicago. In 2023, a man she'd known from high school added her on LinkedIn; they hadn't spoken in 20 years. When she brought it up to friends, some of them told her to ignore it. It was an unusual move, after all, and he hadn't sent a message. But she went ahead and accepted the request, since they'd had crushes on each other way back when. After that, they got to chatting. They're now married.

She points out that he could have just Googled her, especially since she has a website where he could have contacted her. He thought LinkedIn would be the least creepy avenue.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.