I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed Over

  > - All biometric personal data is deleted immediately after processing.

I'm not a security expert so please correct me. Or if I'm on the right track please add more nuance because I'd like to know more and I'm sure others are interested

All of which is meaningless if it's not reflected properly in their legal documents/terms. I've had interactions with the Flock CEO here on Hacker News and he also tried to reassure us that nothing fishy is/was going on. Take it with a grain of salt.

[delayed]

But why believe that when their policy says any of it may not be true, or could change at any time?

Even if the CEO believes it right now, what if the team responsible for the automatic-deletion merely did a soft-delete instead of a hard delete "just in case we want to use it for something else one day"?

> that require legal to get involved and you do end up with documents that sound excessively broad

If you let your legal team use such broad CYA language, it is usually because you are not sure what's going on and want CYA, or you actually want to keep the door open for broader use with those broader permissive legal terms. On the other hand, if you are sure that you will preserve user's privacy as you are stating in marketing materials, then you should put it in legal writing explicitly.

A KYC provider is a company that doesn't start with neutral trust. It starts with a huge negative trust.

Thus it is impossible to believe his words.

I'm not convinced there's any significant overlap between "people who are worried about which subprocessors have their data" and "people who don't think that eight subprocessors is a lot"

Whelp, so long as the CEO says it's fine, we've no reason to worry about what's in the legal verbiage.

All of those statements require trust and/or the credible threat of a big stick.

Trust needs to earned. It hasn't been.

The big stick doesn't really exist.

Why would we believe they are deleted after processing and not shared with the government?

this is just "trust me bro" with more words. even if true, the point is not what they do right now, the point is what they CAN do, which clearly as pointed in terms is a lot more than that.

This is a good example of why it's insane that nobody at Mozilla cares that they hire CEOs that have only a LinkedIn page. If you want to visit the website of the Mozilla CEO, you have to create an account and log in. No big deal if it's a CEO of a plastics manufacturing company, but when the mission is fighting against the behavior of companies like LinkedIn, it makes me wonder why Mozilla exists.

Linkedin has been breached a lot over time.

But I have such low faith in the platform that I would readily believe that once they think you're not going to continue adding value, they find unpleasant ways to extract the last bit of value that they reserve only for "ex"-users.

My assumption was that it was an intelligence platform first. Just like Skype, Microsoft decided to randomly buy it.

It amazing really. If you reached out to people and asked them for the information and graph that LinkedIn maintains, most employers would fire them.

A LinkedIn account's sole purpose is publishing, dissemination, and advertising information about you and your company. Anything that you badly want to keep private certainly does not belong there, much like it does not belong to a large roadside billboard.

Otherwise, LinkedIn can be quite useful in searching for a job, researching a company, or getting to know potential coworkers or hires.

Email spam is, to my mind, an inevitability. You should expect waves of spam, no matter what address you use; your email provider should offer reasonable filtering of the spam. Using a unique un-guessable email address, like any security through obscurity, can only get you so far.

LinkedIn has a wild past. I'm surprised that it seems like no one remembers. Scanning users e-mail inboxes, creating fake users, etc.

ofc it's sold. Take a look at this: https://www.rb2b.com/

It identifies users that visit your site and then shows their email, phone number and living place based on their Li profile ;))

It’s definitely not a fluke. I was getting between 20 and 30 spam emails per day. Simply out of curiosity I deleted my linkedin account and the spam abated. After a week the spam reduced to a trickle and now after a few months I only get a few spam emails per week. Shortly after discovering that LinkedIn was the problem I deleted Indeed as well. Indeed has a fairly robust data deletion program.

Remember when LinkedIn was condemned because they copied Gmail’s login page saying “Log in with Google”, then you entered your password, then they retrieved all your contacts, even the bank, the mailing lists, your ex, and spammed the hell out of them, saying things in your name in the style of “You haven’t joined in 5 days, I want you to subscribe” ?

This is precisely why I give each website an alias such as website@example.com. If I start receiving spam to that address, I revoke the alias and name and shame the website online whenever I get the chance. Not that I would use LinkedIn anyway.

You can replace LinkedIn in your post with every social media etc company and it will ring as true as your current post

> It would be interesting to run a semi-controlled experiment to test whether this was a fluke, or if they leaked, sold, or otherwise lost control of my data.

Too much time / energy on your hands? You gave them a unique email ID (which is always the most sensible thing), that's it.

The non-sensible thing was to sign up kn the first place. Nobody needs these narcisstic, BS spewing pseudo-networking places.

> Was forced to verify to get access to a new account. Like, an interstitial page that forced verification before even basic access.

I'm forced to verify to access my existing account.

I cannot delete it, nor opt out of 'being used for AI content' without first handing them over even more information I'm sure will be used for completely benign purposes.

Thank you for sharing this.

I understand, and even agree, that how this is being handled has some pretty creepy aspects. But one thing missing from the comments I see here and elsewhere is: How else should verification be handled? We have a real problem with AI/bots online these days, trust will be at a premium. How can we try to assure it? I can think of one way: Everyone must pay to be a member (there will still be fraud, but it will cost!). How else can we verify with a better set of tradeoffs?

There is some info from Persona CEO on (of course) LinkedIn, in response to a post from security researcher Brian Krebs: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bkrebs_if-you-are-thinking-ab... . I note he's not verified, but he does pay for the service.

> Why do these services have to suck so much.

They can do what they please. Its due to the network effects. The tie-ins of tech are so strong, I'd wager that %99 of why they succeed has nothing to do with competency or making a product for the user, just that people are too immobile to jump ship for too many reasons. Its staggering how much stronger this is than what people give credit for. Its as if you registered all your cells with a particular pain medication provider, and the idea of switching pills makes one go into acute neurosis.

Let’s not forget Persona is linked to Peter Thiel. When Thiel and his friends support the government snatching citizens off the streets, there is unacceptable risk with forcing job seekers and the like to create accounts on LinkedIn.

> KYC platforms have a place

Yes. In hell.

You can follow the discussions between that blogger and the CEO btw - https://x.com/rickcsong/status/2025038040599810385

    Persona was not hacked. No database was breached.  Frontend code source maps were leaked, 
    which means unminified variable names were exposed revealing all the names of our features. 
    These names are already publicly listed in @Persona_IDV's help center and API documentation.

Thank you so much for sharing this. Not only is it a great post, but the site invokes such warm feelings of an internet long lost.

as much as I like the design and the post, that website causes a massive memory leak in Firefox for Mac

I use it as write-only media and I had an okay experience. I have met a lot of people IRL through LinkedIn.

Most people don’t log in to LinkedIn to check the feed. They don’t interact with the feed at all.

It’s used for keeping contacts, having your online resume in a standard place, and maybe messaging people.

The feed is a sideshow. It enrages a lot of people because it’s full of slop, but you need to treat it like almost everyone else: Ignore it. It’s a sideshow.

Kind of. I've had a strict policy since LinkedIn launched of only connecting with people I've actually met and had at least some meaningful conversation with. Most of my contacts are former work colleagues. I think this makes my feed and audience a bit less spammy and grifty.

Here’s the problem I have with your take (even if I agree): LinkedIn has a product to sell. You’re not supposed to be the product, because companies pay to advertise job postings, they sell career tools, sales tools, etc.

At what point is that not enough for them to stop doing data brokerage or sharing?

Beautifully written, I saved your post to send the next friend or relative who asks me why I am so hard-over on privacy. I enjoyed working at Google hears ago as a contractor, and they are my ‘favorite’ tech company - the only mega-tech company who’s services I regularly use, but I am constantly mindful of their business model as I use YouTube, GCP, and their various dev APIs.

> 1. they are selling you as a target.

This is why people sign up for LinkedIn.

They want to be targeted by companies for jobs. Or when they’re applying for a job, they want to be easily found by people at that company so they can see more information.

If you don’t want those things, you don’t need a LinkedIn page.

> Do the corporations that participate in this scheme provide mutual economic benefit? Do they contribute to the common wealth or are they parasitical?

You wrote a long hand wavey post but you stopped short of answering your own question.

The corporations who pay LinkedIn are doing so to recruit people for jobs. I’ve purchased LinkedIn premium for this purpose at different times.

After “targeting” those LinkedIn users, I eventually hired some of them for jobs. There’s your mutual economic benefit. This is why people use LinkedIn.

> It is a long causal change, so it is fair to ask whether there is any empirical evidence. If this is true we would expect to see ...? Well how about prices going up? Well how about in general people are less able to afford housing, food, cars, etc.

You think the root cause of inflation is… social media companies? This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. You’re just observing two different things and convinced they’re correlated, while ignoring the obvious rebuttal that inflation existed and affordability changes happened before social media.

> Somehow the fundamentals of places like linkedin, gmail, google, facebook, etc have eluded people.

I think most people understand the fundamentals of LinkedIn better than you do, to be honest. It’s not a mystery why people sign up and maintain profiles.

well said. You are the product not the consumer. "Soylent green is people!"

> Somehow the fundamentals of places like linkedin, gmail, google, facebook, etc have eluded people.

LinkedIn is slightly different, as it's fundamentally framed as a job board and recruiting platform. The paying customers are recruiters, and the product is access to the prospective candidates. Hence, LinkedIn offering for free services such as employee verification, work history verificarion, employee vouching, etc.

I have no proof but I have suspicions that call-center systems are designed like this on purpose. low-level employees are hamstrung in what they can do, so then they have to hand it off to someone else, with varying degrees of ceremony, which either involves submitting a "ticket" or transferring you to some other department who may or may not have higher privileges wrt what they can do to help you.

Then you might hit a wall where nobody can do anything because you're trapped in the gears of some byzantine IT system that decides what can and can't happen at any given time with any given situation.

Then there's the labyrinth of the phone system itself littered low-bit smooth jazz and awful menus not often alleviated by AI voice recognition (which in my experience can sometimes be worse than the older voice systems) and the back and forth from one department to the next either because of the above or because someone or something keeps sending you to the wrong people to get your problems addressed.

If it's not engineered, it's some kinda emergent eldritch abomination that has slowly accreted over the decades.

I think the author was talking about their own professional network being based in Europe, as opposed by LinkedIn, the platform that they're using to contact said network.

Yeah, he might have wanted to use Xing. Of course, he'd be pretty lonely there.

>Let that sink in

That's a hallmark of GPT spam, so it's not surprising there's hallucinations.

Their use of LinkedIn is for local and semi-local professional networks. It's like if you use Nextdoor for your street.

And of course those Europeans use LinkedIn for the network effect (even though LinkedIn is just a pathetic sad dead mall now, so most are doing so for an illusion), because other prior waves of Europeans also used LinkedIn, and so on. Domestic or regional alternatives falter because everyone demands they be on the "one" site.

The centralization of tech, largely to the US for a variety of reasons, has been an enormous, colossal mistake.

It's at this point I have to laud what China did. They simply banned foreign options in many spaces and healthy domestic options sprouted up overnight. Many countries need to start doing this, especially given that US tech is effectively an arm of a very hostile government that is waging intense diplomatic and trade warfare worldwide, especially against allies.

[delayed]

In the era of agents, just create your own website. Also it is insane that this is happening.

Yep, I clicked verify experimentally and all they wanted was my work email and a code they sent to it.

Of course, that works probably because my work has a linkedin account so they know what the official domain is for it.

I guess they'll spam that email but it's not like I care. I already receive spam offering me subcontracting services so I guess it's published somewhere.

> European law enforcement agencies have the same powers.

No they don’t, not in the way that is implied here. A German court can subpoena German companies. Even for 100% subsidiaries in other European or non-European countries, one needs to request legal assistance. Which then is evaluated based on local jurisdiction of the subsidiary, not the parent. Microsoft Germany as operator is subject to US law and access. See Wikipedia “American exceptionalism” for further examples.

>The EU has had 20 years to create an equally successful and popular product, which it failed to do. American companies don’t owe your European nationalist ambitions a dime. Use their products at your own discretion.

I can see not everybody here will agree with me, but I find this take absolutely reasonable. The European space has the capacity and the resources to create a product that replaces something as trivial as Linkedin, and yet it takes the lazy approach of just using American products.

It's the same thing with China's manufactured products, at some point the rest of the world just accepted that everything gets done in China and then keep complaining about how abusive China can be.

The most recent issue is the military question. Europe relied for decades on the "cheap" protection of the USA. Now the USA gave the middle finger to Europe and Europe acts shocked, but Europe is not so shocked when it comes to the military budget it did not spend on self defense during all the time the Americans provided protection.

One detail you might have overlooked: even if you're an American company - if you offer your services in Europe (through the web or otherwise), you're subject to European laws and regulations, including the GDPR.

> In other words I don’t see why any of this is somehow uniquely wrong to the OP.

Did you read the article? It's a dark pattern. It is an act that takes 3 minutes to perform. Yet it takes multiple days of reading legal documents to understand what actually happens. I would argue this feels wrong, to most people who interact with technology.

We have a set of laws here that companies are obliged to follow, regardless of where they are incorporated, so we expect that. We are used to having some basic human rights here, perhaps unlike most Americans these days.

Data processes and ownership of biometric data should be made explicitly clear. It shouldn't take days of reading to understand. It feels wrong to me too.

That response reeks of astonishing arrogance. It doesn’t surprise me that nearly 50% of Americans voted for Donald Trump he perfectly embodies that mindset. Do you genuinely believe you are superior to the rest of the world? What you call “innovation” or a “better product” is often nothing more than the creation of dominant market positions through massive, capital deployment, followed by straightforward rent extraction. The European Union has every right to regulate markets operating within its jurisdiction, especially when there are credible concerns about anti-competitive practices and abuse of dominance. From what I’ve seen, there may be sufficient grounds to consider collective legal action against LinkedIn at the European level. As for so-called “European nationalist ambitions,” rest assured: Europe does not lack capable lawyers or regulatory expertise. I will be forwarding the relevant material to contacts of mine working within the European institutions in Brussels.

The "pull yourselves up by your bootstraps" advice has more weight when the person saying it hasn't taken control of all bootstraps for a good 75 years. This is this toxicity in the toxic relationship between the US and EU. Foot in our faces telling us to pick ourselves up. Ditto South America.

> American companies don’t owe your European nationalist ambitions a dime. Use their products at your own discretion.

As a fairly vociferous eu person....I fully agree.

However, gdpr covers all eu residents, so if US companies don't want to obey eu law, that'sa fine, too.

I see this sentiment constantly. It is genuinely hilarious to watch Americans lecture the world about the free market while feigning shock that Europe hasn't produced its own tech giants.

Claiming "the EU had 20 years to build an equally successful product" is the geopolitical equivalent of a deeply dysfunctional 1950s household. For decades, the husband insisted he handle all the enterprise and security so he could remain the undisputed head of the family. Then, after squandering his focus on a two-decade drunken military bender in the Middle East, he stumbles home, realizes he's overextended, and screams at his wife for not having her own Silicon Valley corner office, completely ignoring that he was the one who ruthlessly bought out her ventures and demanded her dependence in the first place.

America engineered a digitally dependent Europe because it funneled global data straight to US monopolies. To blame Europeans for playing the exact role the US forced them into is historical gaslighting. And pretending the CLOUD Act's global, extraterritorial overreach is the same as local EU law enforcement is just the icing on the delusion cake.

I'm routinely shocked how biased people I work with are against individuals without a linkedin page. So many hiring managers across 15 years in my industry won't consider people without pages. One guy goes on rants how people are "sketchy" if they don't have a verified page and a lot of skill endorsements and testimonials! He'll pull up our vendors pages and check them out during meetings, complain if it isn't available or complete. I used to keep mine very minimal and locked down but I felt pressure from peers to flesh is out and keep it public which I hate.

I also find AI trope-ification articles exhausting to read, there's a reason I've fine tuned my system prompts to wipe all of it away. This reads like "Hey Gemini, I verified my passport on LinkedIn, write an impassioned exposé on Persona's privacy policy".

When people leave in things like staccato language and Blogspot era emphasis, I feel like I might as well copy the Persona privacy policy and prompt my own AI(s) on the topic and read that instead.

> Or it took an hour of back and forth with ChatGPT loaded up with those 34 pages.

That's exactly what I was thinking when I read that line. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with using AI to help decipher large legal documents, just be honest about it.

It does provide an advantage when applying to remote jobs at some companies. They try to filter scammer applicants out early and the verified profile is one signal they look for.

Depends on the company, but in a competitive job market any extra signal can help.

There are a crazy number of fake LinkedIn profiles out there that are used for scamming companies or people.

The badge could (I don't know, haven't done it yet) help you differentiate yourself in a sea of monkeys slinging ChatGPT'd profiles from a third-world boiler room.

(whether it actually does or the monkeys now got a steady source of fake/stolen IDs is another matter)

Subprocessor usually just means that you use their products in a way that your personal data passes through them. For example, let's say you are using cloudflare and aws to host a site, then your subprocessors would be cloudflare and aws.

It can be some more nefarious use, but it can also just be that they (persona in this case) use their services to process/store your data.

"Consent" and "Legitimate Interest" are legal terminology - they're two bases defined in GDPR and have different implications and requirements for balancing user and processor interests.

When the author says that Persona claims the "legitimate interest" basis for these data, they're saying that Persona is trying to achieve maximum flexibility for using the data (since "consent" generally requires specific agreement on a specific use for the data, and the burden of maintaining the consent records, where "legitimate interest" does not).

https://www.bulletproof.co.uk/blog/consent-vs-legitimate-int...

They consented to their data being used to verify their identity, not to train an AI on their data. Each separate purpose the data is being processed for needs its own basis.

The plans were on file in a disused lavatory with a sign in the door saying Beware of the Leopard.

> no one forcing you to do it

This is where I disagree. You basically have to use LinkedIn to participate in today’s job market. These large platforms that are protected by network effects should be highly regulated so they cannot abuse your privacy and rights.

> Why would _that_ be the problem

Because it should still be my choice as to what you do with it, which data you associate with it, and how you store it. Removing that choice is anti-privacy.

> your _face_ is going to be _everywhere_ on the internet.

Why is that your assumption?

Why not show a summary of who actually received the data? It should be easy to implement. You could also add what data is retained and an estimate of how long it is kept for. It could be a summary page that I can print as a PDF after the process is complete.

I'd consider that a feature that would increase trust in such a platform. These platforms require trust, right?

> I work in this space for a competitor to Persona

So that means you are participating in the evil that KYC services are.

The problem with anyone using my face to identify me is that it's hard for me to leave home without it.

> We have a long list of subprocessors, but any one individual going through our system is only going to interact with two or three at most.

So, in aggregate, all 17 data leeches are getting info. They are not getting info on all you users, but different subsets hit different subsets of the "subprocessors" you use.

And there's literally no way of knowing whether or not my data hits "two" or "three" or all 17 "at the most".

> but especially your _face_ is going to be _everywhere_ on the internet. Who are we kidding here? Why would _that_ be the problem?

If you don't see this as a problem, you are a part of the problem

[dead]

So they’ll send the data to whichever of the 17 pay them for it.

Obviously our faces are public, but there’s no easy way to tie it to all my PII unless I give it to them.

Even the title is AI slop. Surprised these slop posts do so well on HN of all platforms but I guess they're just high volume. AI-ese is becoming its own dominant language group at this point

[flagged]

Why would they need to do that? If you start working there you need to show up with your actual ID anyway.

They probably did not. Privacy notices are usually written by non-technical people. They include a lot more than what is actually stored. I’d also be very surprised if they actually interacted with the digital passport (NFC) as part of the process.

I was once part of the process of creating one. After two rounds, business decided too much money is wasted here and all the nonsense will stay. Better to have too much listed than too little.

When I read selfie, I was thinking of one of those motion-based selfies where it's really a short video. And from the video, you can extract those measurements. I'm assuming it wasn't extracted from the passport photo, but rather the passport photo was used to verify that the selfie is of the same person that the passport belongs to.

I just registered at platform.OpenAI.com two days ago for MCP Apps registration and had to do the Persona process! Now I could cry.

Similar experience here.

A few months back I was evaluating one of the GPT-5 models for a side project. Turns out streaming via the API requires org verification, and I decided to look elsewhere.

In hindsight, a good decision given what just came out about Persona.

... i'm pretty sure every website does this lol. Aggressive fingerprinting is so easy to implement and so high ROI from a security/marketing perspective.

My wife works for a competitor of the company mentioned. They are in EU. Still run everything on AWS. The data collected is usually even more than what stated, full video recording of the session with audio etc.

AWS EU region is not doing much, and I suspect most companies run on US providers. EU needs independent platform for this to matter.

Why? I don't want companies and governments to datamine and abuse my data at all. Be it in the US or EU, it's going to be no-way either-way.

It would be even better if the law enforced that this kind of data could only be used for the stated business need (the basic identity verification), and not be stored or used/shared with anyone else. If anyone is caught violating a law like this, throw the entire c-suite in prison for 10 years.

I’m so tired of all these covert ops run by these businesses. They aren’t going to stop until there is a heavy price to pay.

> I'm glad the absurdity of verification is getting attention

It's not. The developers' bubble we're in on the HN is invisibly tiny compared to the real life. And normies are not only perfectly happy uploading all their PII to Persona - they won't even understand what's wrong with that.

The thing about looking straight into the camera and turning your head seems to originate from Chinese apps, including some payment apps, bank apps, and government apps. It’s especially disgusting since it imitates the animation used by Apple Face ID, but of course it’s not at all implemented like Face ID.

They will have an app that asks to scan you passport with your phone's NFC reader. It's pretty common for Identity Verification.

Highly unlikely they did. Just because it’s in the privacy notice doesn’t mean they actually gather or store this information.

And indeed, fingerprints are only accessible using privileged access. Not even you, the passport holder, has access.

Yeah was thinking the same thing. I wonder if the author didnt known that passpory chip == fingerprint.

And FP is a much worse modality to have registered because, as opposed to Face image, fingerprint is not affected by age. So that will match you 99.999999% for ever. Faces change.

I also feel that digital companies get away with “no human representatives”. I should always have access to a human. It should be law. It will screw over a lot of companies and I am all for it since they don’t know what service looks like if it looked them in the eyes.

> look forward to the day when no part of my income depends on horrible platforms that make me desperate for the opportunity to give away my personal data

We are moving into the opposite direction. Drink a verification can.

The nasty part of that is also that you can't even delete your account without getting back into it so you need to doxx yourself to even delete it :(

LinkedIn (like Teams) is a Microsoft product. And it shows.

However, they have a very generous free trial for sales/recruitment. You could probably activate it and get real support.

It can be simple things like using your race, hair color, etc. to infer things about you and treat you differently.

What's holding you back?

As a blogging platform it seems like a mess of fake posturing. Recruiters use it, but that mostly means you get lots of spam. You can find a job without LinkedIn. I deleted my account about a decade ago and feel increasingly justified every time I read about the current state of affairs.

After deleting I got a job from HN "who's hiring", joined a friend's company, and now freelance.

What are the alternatives? Reaching out to recruiters directly?

I think flying to a country is a whole lot different than a little tickmark on a website, sorry.

Don't forget that if you fly to a country you are also bound by their laws. They can do anything to you as long as they can make it stick under their laws. It's one thing that people often don't realise when flying somewhere, you are basically giving a blanket submission to their laws!

For this reason I have a long blacklist of countries I won't visit because they have laws I do not accept.

OK.

Text only, single font size, no whitespace.

“I handed over a lot of personal information to my bank, so every website wanting the same level of access is nothing special to me.”

I am in the USA (regrettably--my nation was conquered and subjugated long ago) and it IS dystopian, but there IS an alternative.

The alternative is stay far away from digital slavery. Keep out of the slaughterhouse. Never approach it, and denounce it with every breath and fiber of your being.

Do you have a phone? It's a surveillance device. Its entire purpose from day one was to enslave you. Do not participate.

The question is, how much are you willing to give up in order to obtain freedom? What lengths will you go to? How badly do you really want it?

> You can verify yourself using company email address

LinkedIn does not support smaller companies; it appears to rely on some kind of whitelist or known-enterprise system. This option is simply not available for at least 90% of users.

Did you need to verify your account first?

That's the Worldcoin Orb 2.0. Stick it in to identify yourself to make a payment.

The problem is your account is still there and you can't even delete it from linkedin until you verify :(

I too found that my LinkedIn account had suddenly become “temporarily” disabled a little while ago, for reasons unspecified. I too was invited to share my government ID with some verification system to get back in again.

I too declined on privacy grounds.

My friends were pestering me about having to have an X account to know what's going on and that it'll be fine if I don't engage with any conversation or even follow anyone. I created one, and started the usual "don't show me this" thing for the crap that comes up in the field by default.

I think my account was active for 10 minutes when it got blocked due to "suspicious activity" and locked. All I have to do now to activate is give them more of my information including my phone number.

I've had this same exact thing happen with Facebook and Instgram too. Facebook was probably no less than 5 years ago so this is not new. You can usually confirm your identity (which they do not know), using your phone number (which they do not have). Read that again. :) They ALL do this.

The kicker is you will not find any sympathy because they start with jurisdictions (3rd world) where they can get away with it and people will lecture you about how you must have done something because Facebook never asked for their phone number or blocked them.

I had Airbnb ask for my passport 10 years ago ffs and I did give it and they still didn't want to give me the place until the proprietor intervened and sorted it out. I had the same exact helpful comments about it online that I described above. "You must have done something", "You're full of shit, they don't ask for passport at all".

This attitude by my "fellow men" is what bothers me most about this whole thing.

And now it's global, the same people will probably go "what do you have to hide", "you show your passport at the border don't you?".

The trouble is, now it WILL be harder for you to find a job later. These policies are “your choice” like a diabetic taking insulin “chooses” to take insulin. If we actually treat things like this as a choice, the word loses all meaning.

insane. interview with a bot.

dropped linkedin after ten years due to an id request.

hurts but if EVERYONE SAID NO it would be better tomorrow.

If you know a better place to look for open positions in Europe, I'm listening.

> You still have a linkedin?

Sadly, LinkedIn has replaced email for initial contact after fairs or in-person client meetings. New real-world contacts look you up on LinkedIn and then use it to ask for things like your email address or mobile number. Because of this, I'm even verified :-(.

Even though I use LinkedIn basically the same way Internet Explorer was used in 2009 (purely as a Firefox or Chrome downloader but not for browsing). LinkedIn is my initial contact details exchange, but not the platform to communicate.

> Isn't that just all ai slop?

It is. I basically get zero useful input. Just biased, shallow rubbish. If there is valuable content it is usually cross-posted from authors who also run blogs I already follow.

Edit: Spelling, grammar, style

You don't have to browse it. Just make a miniscule change in your profile from time to time, save it, and wait for recruiters to contact you.

Once it's a human contact Ai slop doesn't impact you.

It's still used for job hunting and recruiting unfortunately. I got a real message from a real recruiter for a 5k+ employee software company on it just last week. My friends and colleagues dealing with layoffs have had to update their profiles. :(

His blog is AI slop.

Previous article: https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/ai-chatbot-gdpr-data-request/

All from a single blog post:

> that’s not just text, that’s biometric data.

> This isn’t a chat log. It’s a structured psychological profile.

> Not raw conversations — processed insights about who I am, how I think, what I fear, and what motivates me.

> They’re not just storing what you said — they’re analyzing who you are.

> They’re not just answering questions — they’re building a map of what you’re curious about, what you’re planning, what you’re worried about.

> Not because I trusted it — but because it was convenient not to think about trust at all.

> A profile this detailed isn’t just a record. It’s a tool.

> The oracle isn’t neutral. The oracle is taking notes.

> Not because I’m paranoid — because it’s true.

> Do it. Not because you need to delete everything — but because you should know what “free” or even “paid” really costs.

While copying and pasting all of this I read this at the end:

> I need to be honest about something: I wrote this post with an AI. Not just edited by AI. Written with it.

Wouldn't fool anyone anyway