Let me point my own AI at my own feed
LinkedIn lets machines write the crap and clickbait that fills MY feed, then bans ME from using one to read it. Section 8.2 of its User Agreement says why.
My LinkedIn feed is supposedly built from people I chose to connect with and topics I chose to follow. It's mine in every sense except: I'm not allowed to send an agent to read it for me.
The rules sit in section 8.2 of LinkedIn's User Agreement, the list of things every member agrees not to do.1 You may not "use bots or other unauthorized automated methods to access the Services". You may not use "software, devices, scripts, robots or any other means or processes (such as crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons or any other technology) to scrape or copy the Services". And you may not "overlay or otherwise modify the Services or their appearance", which the agreement spells out as including "removing, covering, or obscuring an advertisement".
And that last clause gives the game away. An agent that reads my feed for me would skip the ads, the promoted posts and the minutes on site that the business is measured on. The ban protects LinkedIn's revenue, not my experience of the product.
The machines are allowed to write the noise. I'm not allowed to use one to filter it.
Meanwhile much of the feed now reads as machine-made: posts drafted by AI and formatted for reach. So the one job that obviously needs automating stays manual. I scroll past the humblebrags, the "Agree?" bait and the one-line-per-paragraph broetry, hoping to catch the few posts a week that might matter. A former colleague changing jobs. A client announcing a round. Someone in my sector saying something true.
What I want is simple. An agent that reads my feed on my terms: posts from people I actually work with, real news from my sector, moves in my network and anything that mentions my companies. Everything else hidden. A short summary instead of a scroll.
Right now AI is being used to farm my attention, not to save it. Let me use AI for my benefit, not yours.
Oh, the irony. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which has put billions into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Meanwhile Bill Gates's daughter Phoebe is in the business pages for the wrong reasons. Bloomberg has reported that Phia, the AI shopping app she co-founded, overrode other affiliates' referral codes at checkout to claim commission on sales it didn't drive.2 Phia says the features responsible were removed on 7 July and that it is reviewing every transaction. So the platform won't let my agent read my feed, and the shopping agent that promised to save people money was, on Bloomberg's account, paying itself first. Who can you trust?
That principle is what we build on at VIA. Your agent works for you, and it reads what you tell it to read.
