Mastodawn

Garrett Klein Feb 23

“I wanted the blue checkmark on LinkedIn. The one that says “this person is real.” In a sea of fake recruiters, bot accounts, and AI-generated headshots, it seemed like a smart thing to do.

So I tapped “verify.” I scanned my passport. I took a selfie. Three minutes later — done. Badge acquired. I felt a tiny dopamine hit of legitimacy.

Then I did what apparently nobody does. I went and read the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not LinkedIn’s. The other company’s”

https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verification-privacy/

Doc AWFL*Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen I'm speechless.

Thank you for going to what was obviously a great deal of trouble to warn us all.

Susanna the Artist 🌻Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen Thanks for doing this research.

Colorblind Cowboy Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen Is this the Clear thing? I saw what they wanted and thought, “no thanks.”

Wouldn't it make more sense to read those before uploading your personal documents?

@Ivovanwilligen

Marianne Feb 22

@EverydayMoggie @Ivovanwilligen why be like this? They made something useful. Who do you know who ever reads the Ts&Cs? If you do, you're in a small minority. Maybe uplift instead of coming down on people for everything.

In fact, I do read all the details before signing up for anything. Everybody should, especially now, because the stakes are a lot higher than they used to be.

@noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen

Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷Feb 22

@EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen
The problem is, for most people they need the service they are registering with (or at least think they do). Not signing is not an option, so what’s the point of reading the small print?
For example, I want the security updates on my iPhone. I have to click ‘accept’ to get them. The alternative is effectively to brick my phone.
It’s a scandal, and law makers the world over are not getting a grip.

@KimSJ
@EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen
The law does recognise this and the reality is a lot of these clickwrap "adhesion contracts" are extensively modified by consumer law. This can make interpretation difficult as I guess we see here.

I don't even bother with the fine print for financial services products because the industry is heavily regulated and they can just change the terms anyway. What am I going to do, pay off my mortgage because I don't like clause 45.6.7? 😕

everton137 Feb 23

@KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen Not everyone has the time to read and understand the details and implications of what's written.

Governments should hold those companies accountable and protect our privacy.

Rage Rumbles 🏴‍☠️ 🏳️‍🌈 🫂🔞Feb 23

@everton137 @KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen

So you want someone else to do the work for you?

Exactly why we are in this mess to begin with.

Your protection is YOUR JOB first and foremost.

everton137 Feb 23

@Black_Flag @KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen

You think it’s my job to read every term of service and privacy policy. We disagree.

We live in a democracy. That’s precisely why we have laws, regulators, and public institutions, to ensure that companies follow fair rules and don’t take advantage of people. It’s neither realistic nor reasonable to expect every individual to read and fully understand dozens of lengthy, complex legal documents just to participate in everyday digital life.

Consumer protection exists for a reason. Accountability shouldn't depend on how much free time or legal expertise each person has; it should be built into the system.

Rage Rumbles 🏴‍☠️ 🏳️‍🌈 🫂🔞Feb 23

@everton137 @KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen

You have put your trust in "we live in a democracy"? Do you ever watch the damn news?

Its people like you who have screwed all of us as you sit there telling us all why you are just going to do as you are told like a good boy.

People who don't have the simple will to engage in the merest self-protection deserve all they get. What pisses me off is its people like you who ruin it for everyone else because once there are enough people like you the rest are forced to comply..

@Black_Flag @everton137 @KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen god you're insufferable lmaoo

Disagree. Victims blaming is a sophisticated mechanism of moving regulatory responsibility away from centralised and well resourced organizations in the government and company and distributing it amongst the poorly resourced and fragmented general public.

This Victorian attitude is unwise and unsound.

@everton137 @KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen

Michael Newton Feb 23

@doctormo@floss.social yeap. Unless you think that young children should be responsible for reading and perfectly understanding the implications of the t&cs, and the elderly, and the people learning the local language, and the expert carpenter who happened not to get a formal education, and... oh, anyone who's vulnerable in pretty much any way, and everybody who isn't better at lawyering on the fly than a corporate legal department with as much time as they want @Black_Flag@beige.party @KimSJ@mastodon.social @EverydayMoggie@sfba.social @Ivovanwilligen@mastodon.social @everton137@social.vivaldi.net @noodlemaz@mstdn.games

Martin Owens :inkscape: (@doctormo@floss.social)

863 Posts, 729 Following, 2.97K Followers · Inkscape Programmer and Software Freedom Contractor. Graphics, art, computers, politics, ideas, science. Pronouns: they/them Politics: A socialist... well, a federated pro-social consensualist... er, or something like that. Meme Immunity: Innate rebel, adaptive skeptic, and pro-humility Culture: British, Northern, Industrialist, Riverfolk, Pro-Sustainability, Pie. My avatar image is a cartoon cat in a bowler hat with a spanner and overalls working on a machine.

FLOSS.social

@Black_Flag @everton137 @KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen you know why we have governments right... ?

Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷Feb 23

@Black_Flag @everton137 @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen
This is nonsense! One individual refusing the terms and conditions has exactly zero impact on a company. In all probability it won’t even know that you did!
Only governments have the power to make a difference to abusive T&Cs.

@everton137 @KimSJ @EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen This is why https://tosdr.org/fr/
@ToSDR

Terms of Service; Didn't Read

'I have read and agree to the Terms' is the biggest lie on the web. Together, we can fix that.

notsoloud Feb 23

@KimSJ
The lawmakers do have a grip. They are part of it. Do you think it's a coincidence that "age" (identity) verification is suddenly being pushed by politicians all over the world at the same time?

Something big is happening behind the scenes. Who of the lawmakers are movers and who are mere pieces is still unclear to me.
@EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen

@EverydayMoggie @noodlemaz @Ivovanwilligen there's literally not enough time in a person's life to evaluate all the TOSs and EULAs of companies they interact with. With every business you enter and every commercial website you visit, you agree to TOS. And they get updated all the time too!

Karel Brits 🔻Feb 23

@EverydayMoggie it would , but it took him an entire weekend to go through it, while the verification process is 3 minutes. @Ivovanwilligen

@Ivovanwilligen my company gives their employees security classes twice a year and one of the first things they teach you is to not share personal data with anyone since you can't control who ultimately uses it. I'm sorry you're going through this. That's quite nerve wracking and LinkedIn should be held accountable

@Ivovanwilligen
As an individual that bails on a website that insists I don't connect anonymously, I really have a hard time understanding the compliance here. Set up a web site if you want to establish an online presence.

Marianne Feb 22

@Theriac that works for you, it doesn't work for everyone. Don't be like this.

@noodlemaz
With respect, I made it work for me.

It's clear all corporate social media see biometrics as another commodity they can sell, and they got there by people sighing and accepting them commodifying user data.

Pointing out people shouldn't just shrug and go along with unreasonable requests, isn't "being like that".

@Theriac @noodlemaz Although there is currently no expectation to be verified on LinkedIn (and I wouldn't deal with verification, even if it was), having a LinkedIn account seems to be the standard and a way in which recruiters "verify" one's employment history and connections, before talking to a person. Websites might make sense for people who have some kind of portfolio, but not everyone has something like that.

@Cassiopeia12727 @noodlemaz
Portfolios aren't a requirement for my field.

Karel Brits 🔻Feb 23

@Cassiopeia12727 I left LinkedIn a few months ago. At a certain moment it just didn't feel right anymore , just like I had that same feeling with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter before. No one forces me to have an account there. And I don't feel I'm missing out on anything after I left. @Theriac @noodlemaz

Marianne Feb 23

@karelbrits @Cassiopeia12727 @Theriac I absolutely hate linkedin. I haven't looked at it in about a year, though work is constantly asking us to interact with our stuff there.
It gives me rage.
I got one job out of it years ago, figured I might need it later. Turned off the AI scraping option, if that does anything. Won't be giving them any ID. Delete first.

Karel Brits 🔻Feb 23

@noodlemaz luckily my job doesn't ask me to have an account there, or to interact with stuff on a social media platform. @Cassiopeia12727 @Theriac

Rage Rumbles 🏴‍☠️ 🏳️‍🌈 🫂🔞Feb 23

I wish people would sometimes understand that just shrugging and going along with stuff is a one way ticket to societal incarceration FOR EVERYBODY.

Tansy Hoskins 🍉 🍉Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen holy crap - thanks for pointing this out. Appreciate it and will share!

Melroy van den Berg Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen ow no.. Ow no no no no. It's the same company as Discord and Roblox. Persona is evil.

Don Hawkins - W7DAH Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen @AnnaAnthro I dumped LI when Microslop bought them. Even with 6k+ connections. Haven’t missed LI for a second.

Simon Zerafa (Status:

@Ivovanwilligen

Oh shit 😣🤦‍♂️

Persona 😥😵‍💫

Matthew Weier O'Phinney Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen I'd considered doing verification there, but when I saw the requirement of the passport scan, I decided there was no way in hell I'd proceed - the possibility of identity theft with third parties processing the data just seemed too high. Your digging validates that see decision. Yikes!

f♯ a♯ ∞Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen i lost access to my account a while ago when someones which was not me tried to login too many times with a wrong password. If i want my account back, i must go through this process to prove that i'm the actual owner of the account 🙃

Good thing i haven't been looking for customers lately, but it makes me wonder what will happen when i need to 🫣

Luke Harby Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen The slow but complete erosion of privacy.

Rage Rumbles 🏴‍☠️ 🏳️‍🌈 🫂🔞Feb 23

Its a bit worse than that. Its the creation of permanent surveillance.

@Ivovanwilligen this is why I don't have a blue tick

Thomas Arildsen Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen damn, thanks for looking into this. I naively did the verification some time ago and embarrassingly did not pay attention to the details. Time for me to get them to delete my data…

alvin 👍 🥉Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen I'm curious to know if your deletion request and objection to the DPO were acknowledged/honored?

Łukasz Siemiradzki Feb 22

@Ivovanwilligen for the sake of completeness - this persona: https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona/ #privacy #security #persona

the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds

53MB of source code leaked from a government endpoint. 269 verification checks. biometric face databases. SAR filings to FinCEN. and the same company that verifies your ChatGPT account.

vmfunc.re

Cristina Del Biaggio Feb 23

@Ivovanwilligen

OMG!

"And then there’s the weird stuff:

Hesitation detection — they tracked whether I paused during the process

Copy and paste detection — they tracked whether I was pasting information instead of typing it

Behavioral biometrics. On top of the physical biometrics. For a LinkedIn badge."

#LinkedIn #Persona

vepř jako pepř Feb 23

@cdb_77 yep, it is clearly something that cant catch on

vepř jako pepř Feb 23

@cdb_77 you only need a modicum of imagination to see that they want to see who is uncomfortable with being controlled

Ramon de la Fuente Feb 23

@Ivovanwilligen I started the process twice in the past year - both times my spidey-sense started tingling and I didn’t scan any documents.

Anthropic, AWS, OpenAI, Google, GrokAI… why would you need all of those as sub-processors?? Unless you’re using “subprocessor” as a means to share the data…

Thanks for confirming my gut feeling. And for posting this warning for others!

@Ivovanwilligen I deleted my profile instead. It was only a source of useless notifications and spam.

Mariusz Klimczak Feb 23

@Ivovanwilligen Wow, I quite linkedin years ago, look how smart was that. Anyway out of all the stuff on the list, the least expected and most scary seems the behavioural profiling. Hesitation detection? WT_?!

@Ivovanwilligen does anybody know, from a legal perspective, how something like this sits with GDPR saying data can't be processed outside of the EU (or I guess, GDPR respecting countries?

I suppose that's all buried in the terms and conditions somewhere.... "you consent to..."

Michał Fita 1d ago

@paul @Ivovanwilligen if the main service is provided in the EU, LinkedIn may escape that by hosting everything in US.

@Ivovanwilligen at Christmas I purchased a mini bottle of Japanese cider online as a stocking filler, something similar happened, was redirected to a third party service called verifymyage, to which I was supposed to upload my documents — they also employ "age estimation" by "analysing physical features". Of course I refused to participate in this insanity, and I eventually could do it with the supplier manually. But it's insane that this was the default and I even had to ask.

#ageverification

Oliver Rautenberg | Antifa Feb 23

@Ivovanwilligen very interesting. Thanks!

Unredacted Epstein files now Feb 23

@Ivovanwilligen Thank you for your service.

@Ivovanwilligen
This is terrible but I can't help wondering; why did you initially think that giving Microsoft (the owner of LinkedIn) all this data was a good idea, or at least, mostly harmless?

@Ivovanwilligen Great warning about LinkedIn. Can you put a #linkedin #ID #verification hash in the main post ?

Dark Oolong Feb 23

@Ivovanwilligen I shared this on LinkedIn - let's see if shadow ban happens instantly or later :D. Thank you!

Oliver Rautenberg | Antifa Feb 23

@Ivovanwilligen

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/age-verification-vendor-persona-left-frontend-exposed

Age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say

Behind a basic age check, researchers say Persona’s system runs extensive identity, watchlist, and adverse-media screening.

Malwarebytes

@Ivovanwilligen Maybe you can use this work to help complete their page in the extension Terms of service didn't read ? It's empty...
https://tosdr.org/fr/service/11449

Persona - ToS;DR

@Ivovanwilligen

they sit invisibly between you and the platforms you trust.

But you don't trust Linkedin, no?