Privacy Expert Reveals the Shocking Truth of What Happens to Your Personal Data When Getting Verified on LinkedIn

An online sleuth uncovers the site’s hidden link to a tech company that collects and shares all your personal data with a global network of AI partners

BY KEVIN HAYNES, NEWS WRITER

LinkedIn users who sign up to get their identity and credentials “verified” online are unwittingly routing their personal data to a third-party company that lurks in the background to accumulate and share that information with parties ranging from government and consumer credit agencies to utility companies and mobile network providers.

The clandestine process was exposed last week by a Zurich-based Mastodon user who calls himself  “rogi” and writes about “surveillance capitalism” on a blog dubbed The Local Stack. “I wanted the blue checkmark on LinkedIn,” explained rogi, who builds privacy-first tools and offers data protection advice. “The one that says ‘this person is real.’”

Following LinkedIn’s step-by-step guide to getting verified, rogi said he scanned his passport, took a selfie, and within three minutes was awarded the site’s signature blue checkmark. “Then I did what apparently nobody does,” he said. “I went and read the privacy policy and terms of service”—only to discover those 34 pages of disclosures didn’t stem from LinkedIn.

Turns out users seeking verification are covertly routed to Persona Identities, Inc. of San Francisco, a technology company that provides sites like LinkedIn with a customized verification platform that helps businesses and organizations fight fraud, meet compliance requirements, and manage onboarding.

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“I had never heard of Persona before this,” rogi said. “Most people haven’t. That’s kind of the point—they sit invisibly between you and the platforms you trust.”

Persona not only collects the usual personal details—name, address, birthday, and contact info—it also extracts “facial geometry” data from photos, pinpoints your geographic location, and examines behavioral biometrics, including “hesitation detection” (any pauses taken during the application process) and whether application information was manually typed or inserted via a copy-and-paste tool.

All of these personal details and images are then shared with Persona’s “global network of partners,” including vendors, law enforcement, and 17 “subprocessors” that sift through personal data on Persona’s behalf. The list includes some of the biggest names in the artificial intelligence industry, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Groqcloud. “Three AI companies are processing your passport and selfie data,” rogi pointed out. “Your government-issued identity document is being fed through the same companies that build large language models and AI systems.”

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