[jeffkumar]

I don’t think this is about ignoring consent. It’s about who controls relationships. These are mutual, first-degree connections, and the emails are intentionally visible to me.

LinkedIn isn’t protecting people from misuse here; it’s preventing portability. If the concern were outreach consent, that could be handled with clearer user controls. Blocking access entirely keeps relationships dependent on the platform, which conveniently aligns with their business incentives.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Again, there's a very clear user control. On the email visibility settings page, there's a toggle named "Allow connection to export emails". The 5% of contacts who had an email in your data dump are the 5% of people who've chosen to let you export their email by enabling this toggle.