Next to “is LinkedIn Premium worth it,” this is the question I get asked most: should I make my first degree connections private so nobody can see who I know?
Before I answer it, I have to tell you about my dad’s green recliner.
The advice my dad gave me in a green recliner
Freshman year of high school. Rolled jeans, enormous bangs, and so much White Rain hairspray in our house that I am fairly sure I still have spots on my lungs.
I was in the middle of a full blown teenage crisis. The last two girls I had dated had both met the same friend of mine, decided they liked him better, and dumped me for him.
So I sat in my dad’s home office, rocking back and forth in his green recliner, ranting.
“How am I supposed to stop this guy from stealing my girlfriends?”
My dad just smiled.
“John, when you find one who really likes you and cares about you, you are not going to have to worry about this guy or anybody else,” he said. “Real love doesn’t work like that.”
I have thought about that line every single time somebody has asked me whether a competitor might go poking through their connection list.
If a client would leave you over a list, the list was never the problem
The fear underneath this question is always the same. Somebody will see who I work with, go around me, and take them.
Here is the uncomfortable version of my dad’s advice. If a competitor can look at a name on your connection list, send one message, and walk off with that client, you did not lose them to the list. You lost them to whatever you were or were not doing for the last two years.
That is not a lecture. It is good news, because it means the thing you actually control is the thing that matters.
When you do the work, deliver something genuinely useful, and treat the people who pay you like the reason your business exists, a name on a list is not a threat. It is just a name on a list.
Price is only an issue in the absence of value
I happily pay more for a phone than I need to. Years inside the Apple ecosystem, everything talking to everything, and I am not going anywhere for a cheaper handset.
Meanwhile, if somebody knocked on my door tomorrow and offered to haul my garbage for ten dollars a month less, I would say yes before they finished the sentence. I do not know the people who pick up my garbage. They have never asked me a single question about myself. Garbage pickup is garbage pickup.
Two purchases, two completely different levels of loyalty, and the difference has nothing to do with the industry. It is whether a relationship exists at all.
Which one are you to your clients? That question is worth more of your attention than a privacy toggle.
Where the setting actually lives today
The control has moved more than once over the years, and most of the walkthroughs still floating around describe a version of LinkedIn that no longer exists. Here is where it sits now.
Click your photo, then Settings & Privacy. In the left menu choose Visibility. Under Visibility of your profile & network, open Connection visibility.
It is a single on or off switch labelled “Allow your connections to see your connections list.”
Read LinkedIn’s own description of what happens when you switch it off, because it matters:
If you turn off this setting, only you can see your connections list. Your connections can still see any mutual connections or connections who have endorsed you.
So it is narrower than most people assume. Turning it off does not make you invisible. It stops your connections browsing your full list. Anyone you both know still shows up as a shared connection, exactly as before.
The reason to care now is not your competitor
Here is what has genuinely changed since I first wrote about this.
Back then the worry was a rival clicking through your contacts one at a time. That was always a bit paranoid, and it was slow work.
Today there is an entire industry harvesting professional profile data at scale and reselling it. Enrichment databases, contact lists, sales tools you have never heard of that somehow already have your title and your work email. LinkedIn fights this constantly and it keeps happening anyway.
That is a real thing to be aware of. It is also, unfortunately, not what this setting protects you from. Connection visibility governs what your connections see when they click through your profile. It does nothing about a scraper reading the public version of your page, and it does nothing about the data brokers who already have you.
If you want to reduce your exposure to that, the levers are elsewhere in the same Visibility menu: what your public profile shows to signed out visitors, whether you are discoverable by email or phone number, and whether page owners can export your data. Those are worth ten minutes of your afternoon. Hiding your connection list is not the fix people think it is.
What switching it off actually costs you
Less than the old advice claimed, but not nothing.
Your connection list is quiet social proof. When somebody lands on your profile and can see that you are connected to forty people in their industry, you stop being a stranger and start being someone who is clearly already in the room. That signal disappears when you hide the list.
It also removes a little of the texture that makes people comfortable accepting your invite in the first place, which is the whole game if you are using LinkedIn to turn the invitations you receive into actual conversations.
What it does not cost you is reach. Your connection count, your search visibility, and your ability to appear in a second degree connection’s results are all unaffected. That is the myth I want to kill here, because it stops a lot of people from making a reasonable privacy choice.
So should you turn it off?
For most people reading this, no. The protection is thinner than it sounds and you lose a little credibility for it.
There are three situations where I would say yes without hesitating:
Your client list is genuinely confidential. Some people cannot have it publicly inferable who they work with. Legal, security, certain kinds of advisory work. If that is you, this is not paranoia, it is your job.
You are in an industry with active, aggressive poaching. Recruiting and some agency niches qualify. You know if you are in one.
You are being harassed. If somebody is using your network to work out who to contact about you, switch it off today and do not think about it again.
Outside those three, spend the energy on the product instead. It compounds. A toggle does not.
What to do with this
Go to Settings & Privacy, then Visibility, and actually read the whole list once. Most people have never looked at it. Five minutes.
Then, if none of the three situations above describe you, leave Connection visibility on and go do the thing that actually protects your clients from your competitors, which is being obviously worth keeping.
And if you want your profile itself doing more of that work for you, start with writing a LinkedIn summary that reads like a sales asset, then work through the five strategies we use to generate leads on the platform.
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