in eternity In the battle against online scams, professional social networking platform LinkedIn today announced a suite of new verification features that enable users to authenticate aspects of their identities and employment history. Crucially, users will now have a few different options to verify their identity and current jobs on LinkedIn. This way, if someone attempts to create a fake LinkedIn account, there may be distinct differences between the scammer’s account and the verified profile.
LinkedIn makes verification easy in three ways, all of which are free for individual users. The most low-key option launching today is to verify your current employer by receiving a security code on your work email and entering it into LinkedIn. The social media platform recently piloted its business email verification feature with a small group of companies.
The second option is to verify your LinkedIn identity with Airport Security Clear. The authentication company will take your US phone number and government-issued ID and use the information to verify your name. You have to weigh whether to trust a third party like Clear with your personal data, but the option can be particularly attractive if you already use the company for travel verification and they have your data on file anyway.
The third verification feature allows users to confirm their name and current employer with Microsoft Entra Verified ID credentials, the workplace identification platform that Microsoft launched last year. This option will have a slower rollout process, and will be available at the end of the month to employees at the few dozen pilot companies already registered with Entra.
Once you add any of these verifications to your LinkedIn account, a new “Verification” field will appear on your profile with the details.
“With all of these new free features, we’re helping give you confidence that whoever you connect with and the content you encounter is authentic and authentic,” Oscar Rodriguez, Vice President of Product Management at LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post. Posted today.
After noting in June 2022 that the company had seen a “rise in fraudulent activity” on its platform and across the web, LinkedIn announced efforts in October to detect and remove more fake accounts, expand verification, and generally “enhance the credibility” of its more than 900 million users. . Today’s announcements greatly expand the reach and scope of these verification initiatives.
Having the ability to verify components of your identity and employment will not prevent attackers from creating fictional personas and even fictitious companies to “verify” bogus jobs. But if job verification is widely adopted on LinkedIn, it will be difficult for bad actors to impersonate legitimate accounts and create convincing fake personas.
“Once they seek verification, members and organizations can be more confident that the people they collaborate with are authentic and that the professional affiliations in their profiles are accurate,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post published today.