Platform risk

Where we stand

LeadAdapter automates activity on a platform whose terms of service prohibit automated activity. That is not a grey area we are interpreting generously; it is the plain reading, and every tool in this category is in the same position whether or not it says so on its website.

LinkedIn enforces this. Accounts get warnings, feature restrictions, temporary suspensions and permanent bans. Enforcement is not predictable, not proportional, and not appealable in any way you can rely on.

This risk is not insurable and we do not carry it for you. If your account is restricted while using LeadAdapter, you have lost your account, and we cannot get it back.

What we do about it

Everything below reduces the risk. None of it removes the risk, and we would rather say that twice than let the list read like a guarantee.

• Actions run in your own browser, on your own connection, in your own session — not from a datacentre address that has never seen your account before.
• Default caps are conservative, and the ceiling your plan allows is lower than what the platform would let you get away with for a while.
• Actions are spaced by a randomised gap, never at a regular interval, and capped in any ten-minute window as well as per day.
• Nothing runs during your quiet hours.
• A rate-limit response or a challenge page stops everything for that profile immediately, parks it for 6 hours and halves its caps for 48 hours.
• New profiles default to holding outbound actions for a person to approve, rather than to full autonomy.

What we will never tell you

We will not tell you this product is safe. We will not tell you that your account cannot be restricted, that our activity cannot be spotted, or that any of this sits within LinkedIn's rules. And we will not tell you a cap is a number LinkedIn is happy with — there is no such number, only a number at which enforcement is less likely.

We will not suggest that this product has LinkedIn's blessing, or that LinkedIn knows we exist. LeadAdapter is not affiliated with LinkedIn in any way.

When we know our restriction rate across customers, we intend to publish it, including if it is bad. We do not know it yet, and we are not going to invent a number to fill the gap.

If your account is restricted

Stop everything first. Use the emergency stop, which cancels every queued job for the profile and pauses it; a restriction plus continued automated activity is how a warning becomes a ban.

Then tell us. We cannot recover your account, and we will not pretend we can, but knowing what was running when it happened is how the defaults for everyone else get better.

The other kind of breakage

LinkedIn changes its internals without notice, and when it does, tools in this category stop working. Ours keeps those details on our server rather than inside the extension, so a fix reaches every installed browser on its next check-in instead of requiring a release and a reinstall.

It still means outages. When LinkedIn moves something we have not adapted to yet, the affected job types fail with an explanation rather than silently doing nothing, and the dashboard shows it.

You are the runtime

Nothing runs while Chrome is closed, and nothing runs without a LinkedIn tab open. If you travel, close your laptop, or work for a week from a machine where the extension is not installed, your automations are not running.

That is the price of not holding your credentials, and we think it is the right trade. It is also the single most common support question, which is why it is on three pages of this documentation.

Data protection

Profile data and enriched contact details about people in the EU are personal data, and processing them for outreach rests on legitimate interest at best. That means it has limits, and the limits are real ones.

We host in the EU, keep leads and the audit log for a bounded period, honour a do-not-engage list across the whole product, add anyone who asks you to stop to it automatically, and offer export and deletion without a support ticket.

The one thing to be clear about: LeadAdapter is not a cold email tool and does not send email from our infrastructure on your behalf. Email goes through your own provider, on your own sending reputation, under your own lawful basis.