LinkedIn has spent the past several months rolling out stricter identity checks: verifying companies as official brand presences, requiring verification for leadership and recruiter roles, and, more recently, requiring executive-level titles (Director, VP, and above) to confirm their workplace before the title goes live on their profile.
The intent is good. Recruitment scams and fake "employees" have been a real, long-standing gap on the platform; anyone could list themselves as working somewhere with zero checks. Closing that gap matters, especially as AI tools get better at generating convincing fake profiles and outreach.
But this week brought a wrinkle: Persona, the third-party vendor powering LinkedIn's verification checks, is facing questions about how it handles the personal data, including biometric data, that users hand over to get verified. Reports suggested Persona was sharing user data more broadly with its own data partners than expected. Persona has pushed back, saying biometric data is deleted immediately after processing and other personal data within 30 days, and that nothing is used for AI training. But the questions haven't fully gone away, and if more issues surface, it could slow or derail LinkedIn's whole verification rollout.
Why this matters right now
Set aside who's right in the Persona dispute. The bigger signal is this: to get verified on LinkedIn, you're increasingly asked to hand sensitive personal and biometric data to a third party you didn't choose, with limited visibility into exactly how it's handled downstream. And verification itself isn't optional forever, LinkedIn is steadily expanding which roles require it.
That's a reasonable moment to ask: does all of your professional networking activity need to run through a system where trust in the verification layer is currently in question?
You don't have to leave LinkedIn
To be clear, this isn't an argument to delete your LinkedIn profile. It's still where your professional history lives, and plenty of legitimate activity happens there. The smarter move is a soft migration: keep LinkedIn as a passive presence, but start shifting your active networking, outreach, and connection-building somewhere that doesn't ask you to trade sensitive data for basic trust.
That's the gap Kuerate is built for, a professional network designed around consent and intent from the ground up, without a third-party biometric checkpoint standing between you and the people you want to reach. Outreach isn't free-for-all noise; it's filtered and tied to real value, so your inbox stays signal, not spam.
The timing lines up. As verification becomes more central (and more contested) on the platforms professionals already use, it's worth having a second home for your networking that isn't dependent on someone else's vendor relationships holding up.
Source: Social Media Today, "Concerns with third-party partner could derail LinkedIn's verification push"