Searching the LinkedIn API without authorizing a user

Question

Im currently creating a PHP application that searched various Social Media and analyses the results. Now im stuck at calling the LinkedIn API.

I need to call these API's without user authentication (I need a sort of app authentication). Facebook offers a way to retrieve an access token, based on app key and secret. With Twitter I simply used my own accestoken en access secret.

I searched all day for a way to call the LinkedIn API in a similar way, but havent succeeded in finding one. I also couldn't find my own access token en secret on the LinkedIn developer's site.

Do you know how I can access the LinkedIn API from my PHP application, without the user having to login himself?

Hope you guys can help me out!

Answer 1

The LinkedIn API doesn't support non-user-authenticated requests - that is, there are no calls for which you can just use the consumer key and secret - they all require a user token and secret as well.

The LinkedIn API is designed to be used from the member's perspective, acting on behalf of a specific member - it's not designed to support general application search use cases.

Terms of use: https://developer.linkedin.com/documents/linkedin-apis-terms-use