alt Hacker NewsI verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over
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everyone on linkedin sounds like chatgpt / claude.
The privacy concerns are real.
The need / demand for some verification system might be growing though as I’ve heard fraudulent job application (people applying for jobs using fake identities… for whatever reason) is a growing trend.
As a European citizen I hope it becomes law to have this data processed in the EU rather than the US.
I'm glad the absurdity of verification is getting attention. I was "forced" to verify by Linkedin to unlock my account. It was last year, and I had left my previous job, but I had not yet lined up a new job. So one of the only times in my career I might actually get value from Linkedin, they locked me out, removed my profile, and told me if I wanted back in, I'd have to verify. I felt helpless and disgusted.
I gave in and verified. Persona was the vendor then too. Their web app required me to look straight forward into my camera, then turn my head to the left and right. To me it felt like a blatant data collection scheme rather than something that is providing security. I couldn't find anyone talking about this online at the time.
I ended up finding a job through my Linkedin network that I don't think I could have found any other way. I don't know if it was worth getting "verified".
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Related: something else that I find weird. After the Linkedin verification incident, my family went to Europe. When we returned to the US, the immigration agent had my wife and I look into a web cam, then he greeted my wife and I by name without handling our passports. He had to ask for the passport of our 7 month old son. They clearly have some kind of photo recognition software. Where did they get the data for that? I am not enrolled in Global Entry nor TSA PreCheck. I doubt my passport photo alone is enough data for photo recognition.
Thank you for doing and sharing what I was hesitant to do. Now I know with good reason why.
> My NFC chip data — the digital info stored on the chip inside my passport
Do we know how they get that? Because my fingerprints are also in there, so...
I think at this point we should all accept the fact that Information Tech = Spy Tech = Surveillance Tech. This is not about Linkedin or bad implementation by some 3rd party company. This is on purpose. Bad news is that countries started to make id verification mandatory for social media usage. That is also coordinated and for surveillance purposes.
Actually Steve Blank has a great talk on the roots of Silicon Valley. SV basically built upon military tech meeting private equity. That's why it's wildly different than say Berlin startup scene, and their products are global and free.
On EU data sovereignty:
The OP is right. For that reason we started migrating all of our cloud-based services out of USA into EU data centers with EU companies behind them. We are basically 80% there. The last 20% remaining are not the difficult ones - they are just not really that important to care that much at this point but the long terms intention is a 100% disconnect.
On IDV security:
When you send your document to an IDV company (be that in USA or elsewhere) they do not have the automatic right to train on your data without explicit consent. They have been a few pretty big class action lawsuits in the past around this but I also believe that the legal frameworks are simply not strong enough to deter abuse or negligence.
That being said, everyone reading this must realise that with large datasets it is practically very likely to miss-label data and it is hard to prove that this is not happening at scale. At the end of the day it will be a query running against a database and with huge volumes it might catch more than it should. Once the data is selected for training and trained on, it is impossible to undo the damage. You can delete the training artefact after the fact of course but the weights of the models are already re-balanced with the said data unless you train from scratch which nobody does.
I think everyone should assume that their data, be that source code, biometrics, or whatever, is already used for training without consent and we don't have the legal frameworks to protect you against such actions - in fact we have the opposite. The only control you have is not to participate.
so their "shady" network of subprocessors are just the companies that already have all of your data? wow. I'm pretty sure I use most if not all of them in my own stack.
In any case, I don't know how much more ad money they'll extract from knowing what I look like. Maybe beauty products?
Blue tick is the thin end of the wedge, as is "think of the children" ID demands.
It won't be long before we'll be required to verify ID for every major website.
LinkedIn is no longer a "professional network". I'm actually considering DELETING my account.
Through extensive data harvesting, and exchanging and partnering across thousands of such data miners, I suspect that by now, the graph of identities and fingerpinted devices must be practically complete. That means that all your actions on the internet can be tracked back, via device fingerprinting and cookie networks, to your physical identity. Great milestone for the surveillance states.
I guess the day that a corporate AI could easily fake all my online existence is drawing nigh.
If you fly to US, Singapore, and many other countries these days, your face will be photographed and the photo will be matched to your passport photo via facial recognition (the machine tells you that outright, and does the action on the spot). They also take your right hand fingerprints.
Those 17 sub processors are probably the most vanilla cloud computing companies you're going to find. Maybe you can complain about using one of the three LLM providers for doing OCR but there have been quite a few posts here about how LLMs are great for OCR.
Peter Thiel knows about the anti-christ...
What should an ideal work website or social network be like?
The only thing left is for them to want our asses.
AI slop blogspam
Here's where you went wrong: you're on LinkedIn. Since it's your first time, this one is free, I'll be collecting micropayments for future advice, rest assured.
I was randomly forced to do this about a year ago, gave them everything except a passport (Tried providing other doc but support is either bots or overseas), got rejected, and lost a 15 year old legitimate business account.
Could never find any explanation why I was targeted by this - it said it detected “suspicious activity” but I only ever interacted with recruiters, and only occasionally. Supposedly it is deleted after if you don’t go all the way through, but I do not believe it. This data ends up in very weird places and they can go fuck themselves for it afaic.
> The legal basis? Not consent.
> The reason? US surveillance laws […]
This slop in every blog post? Fucking tiresome.
I verified my account and I handed over the same info as I handed over when I was getting MSFT Azure cert exam.
So it was nothing special for me.
LinkedIn is the ultimate intelligence test: if you register, you have lost
Modern day LinkedIn is a terrible company that violates privacy as bad as any other social media company.
Also, the content on LinkedIn is terrible and fake.
Need to start shunning these bad actors.
Persona just got hacked so we're off to a good start.
I am in India and this is the reason I have not verified till now. I do not know how LinkedIn has the audacity to ask for this level of personal detail. This seems dystopian to me.
LinkedIn is a social network and I wish there was an alternative.
Since some job offers require a linked in link, I maintain an empty page explaining why maintaining a LI account is a privacy and security hole. It turns out it works.
LinkedIn support will also blatantly lie to you when you ask them whether Persona is GDPR compliant and needed to activate your account.
Last year I was trying to setup a business LinkedIn page for SEO purposes, which meant I also had to create a personal account. After being told several times that I absolutely need to scan my ID card with that dodgy app I simply replied that I can't do it due to security concerns. After several weeks they unlocked my account anyway, but I suspect this would not happen if algorithms determined that I actually needed that account to find a job and pay my bills.
You can verify yourself using company email address - maybe I am being naive to think that it’s much safer, but it’s way better than handing over your ID data.
I never understand why people supply too much info about themselves for small gains.
People at LinkedIn wants you to believe that your career is safe if you play by their games, but ironically they are one of the main reasons why companies nowadays are comfortable with hiring and firing fast.
They are making the apparatus to destroy our freedoms.
TFA should have mentioned that this junk has ties to security services in Five Eyes, through Paravision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paravision_(identity_verificat...
Well don't do that then.
welp, yikes
Just wait when next time they ask for your member length and girth or flaps size.
LinkedIn locked me out of my account, and wants me to verify via this same Persona company. I didn't read the terms but there's no way I'm giving Microsoft or its minions my govt id.
What this user missed is the affidavit option: you can get a piece of paper attested by a local authority and upload that instead, if you really really need a LinkedIn verified account.
Microsoft can go jump.
What a sad story. I feel sorry for this person. But it was very naive to put that data up in the first place. I recently tried to open a FB acct so I could connect with local community but within 2 days I was accused of being a bot and asked to start a video interview with a verification bot. That didn't happen, local community can do without me ;)
Thanks for writing this up. I didn't realize the privacy rot went so deep.
Aside from their AI-slopped newsfeed (F@#$!!!) which should have died long ago, this is atrocious. "Enshittification" was created just for this. Sorry, I got sidetracked.
Isn't there anyone from LinkedIn here??
Just wait until GitHub starts requiring this.
So LinkedIn’s 1st CEO Reid Hoffman who was all up in relationships with Epstein & Bone Saw, yakking it up with monsters is the place to store your employment history? To provide a blue checkmark? To feed into copliot & be sold to AI weapons vendors & gruesome thugs like Palantir’s CEO & Chairman? Yikes.
This is all bad, but I feel compelled to call out the “geolocation (inferred from your IP)” tidbit, because I can vouch that in the era of IPv4 scarcity, this value is often wildly wrong. When I’m at home, for the past 10 years, living in three different cities in that time, my ISP-granted IP address registered as incorrect locations (often by hundreds of miles) more often than not. And my mobile phone is always wrong, showing me in Colorado, St Louis, or North Carolina depending on the day. None of those locations are even close to correct.
It’s truly a shame we are allowing these companies to steal and share and abuse our personal data, and it’s even worse that even the very basics of that data are so often blatantly wrong.
This process will be done in a way that you won’t even have to do it in 3min, it will be part of you phone wallet, and whenever you sign up you will be required to verify it there, essentially, all big tech will be having a copy of your biometric, and consequently, all three letter agencies too. Welcome to the tyranny of big tech!
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> And look at who’s doing “Data Extraction and Analysis” — Anthropic, OpenAI, and Groqcloud. Three AI companies are processing your passport and selfie data.
That's quite cool, it means that soon models will be able to create a fake ID photos with real data.
I'm so excited about it! /s
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My ISP and my bank decided they needed my biometrics to have an account, same sort of thing