LinkedIn and LexisNexis

Two changes to my online footprint over the last few days, neither one I set in motion.

The LinkedIn admin removal

I set up the Tomotechi company page on LinkedIn around 2009 and have not been an active LinkedIn user in many years. This week I logged in to refresh the profiles — new photos, updated text — and found I'd been unlinked as an administrator of the page I created. The page itself was untouched: the original copy I wrote fifteen-odd years ago was all still there. Only my access had changed.

The honest range. The benign reading is strong: LinkedIn has restructured its company-page admin model several times across fifteen years, and inactive admins get pruned in those migrations. An account that hasn't logged in for years is exactly the kind that falls off an admin list during a platform change. And the tell that usually marks a hostile takeover — altered content — is absent. Nobody changed the page; only who could change it. The concerning reading — that someone deliberately removed the founder's access — has to explain why they'd leave everything else pristine.

I got the access back the simple way: I messaged another member of my team who, for whatever reason, still had admin rights, and they re-granted me super admin. That resolution points toward the benign reading too — not a locked-out hostile seizure, just an access state I didn't expect and could restore through an ordinary channel.

The LexisNexis suppression request

The same window produced a second one: a confirmation email from LexisNexis for a public-records suppression request — an opt-out that removes my information from their public-records products — that I do not recall submitting.

The honest range again. The most ordinary explanation is a data-broker-removal service: people subscribe to services that auto-file suppression and opt-out requests with LexisNexis, Spokeo, and the rest, and a confirmation like this is exactly what those generate — possibly one I set up and forgot. The concerning reading is that someone filed it in my name. The strange part of that reading is the direction: a suppression request is normally privacy-positive, so if someone else submitted it, the question is who benefits from making my records harder to pull — and that is not an obvious motive. Both readings stay on the record.

Two footprint changes, days apart, neither initiated by me, noticed together. That last clause is the only thing tying them — they may be entirely unrelated, one platform-migration artifact and one privacy-service confirmation, and the brain is good at binding two odd things that land in the same week into a single story. Logged as found, with the benign explanations given equal weight, because that is the discipline the rest of this record runs on. The screenshots are kept here, redacted where it suited me.