Why LinkedIn games have a more serious purpose: David Richards
Last year LinkedIn asked me to play a game. Not a job alert, not a request to connect, a game: a little grid called Queens, with a timer.
I solved it in under two minutes and was told that I had beaten several connections, although a chief executive I know had done it faster. Then Bloomberg started. Its weekly news quiz, Pointed, scores your answers and your confidence in them, while Alphadots sets a daily word puzzle beside a chart; both invited me to see how I compared.
I went back. Why worry? A familiar company had offered me two minutes of amusement, and I had stopped asking what else it might get out of the arrangement.
LinkedIn reported in March 2025 that 84 per cent of players returned the next day, while Bloomberg said in September that about 80 per cent of its playing subscribers came back every week. Every morning is where the money is.
Thirty years in software have taught me to look past the screen. In 2013 the American regulator went after Brightest Flashlight Free, a torch app downloaded tens of millions of times, which it said sent users’ locations and device identifiers to third parties before they had even accepted its terms. The torch worked.
The personality test that fed Cambridge Analytica collected information about participants’ Facebook friends too, and Facebook later estimated that up to 87 million people’s information might have been improperly shared. Most had never taken the test.
A game could record your mistakes and abandoned attempts as well as your score, and a history of those results, matched to your professional profile, would come with your name and a decade of career history attached.
Suppose those records were repurposed. An employer could buy a report comparing its staff’s solve times over six months, with a slowing department labelled a burnout risk, while a recruiter might reject candidates who abandon puzzles as people who lack persistence.
Track an executive’s scores over five years and a data broker could market the trend as a warning of cognitive decline, without a doctor ever examining them. Or an advertising system could treat this morning’s mistakes as evidence that you are tired, then choose that moment to push an expensive purchase with a countdown clock.
These judgements could be nonsense. You might have answered the door halfway through, yet a bad inference could still cost you an interview without anyone telling you why.
I have no evidence that LinkedIn or Bloomberg is doing this. LinkedIn says scores remain private unless players opt into its connections leaderboard or share them directly, which answers who can see a score without explaining what the company might infer from the underlying record.
A stranger asking to test your concentration every morning and file the results beside your CV would get a different reception from a puzzle under a familiar logo. We mistake familiarity for protection.
The companies should state what they keep and rule out using gameplay to assess our health or suitability for work, or to target us according to inferred weaknesses. Put that promise beside the play button. I should not have to wait for a scandal to discover what became of the information I supplied while having a break.
This Friday morning, before you play, ask who is keeping score, and of what.
David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs