Are you verified? ✅ Good for you!

LinkedIn now lets you slap a little checkmark on your profile ✅. You upload your government ID (hello? 🚨), let a third-party scan your face, and in return you get a badge that says "yaaas, this is me for real. slaaay." LinkedIn calls it a trust and safety feature and they frame it as protecting the platform from bots and scammers. Noble stuff.

But let's look at who's actually doing the verification - and who's behind them - because that's where this gets REALLY interesting.

Meet Persona

LinkedIn's identity verification is powered by a company called Persona - withpersona.com. When you verify your LinkedIn profile, Persona is the one scanning your face, reading your government ID, and running background checks.

Persona was founded in 2018, is valued at $2 billion, and has raised $418 million across multiple funding rounds. Their Series C and Series D were both led by Founders Fund.

Founders Fund is Peter Thiel's venture capital firm.

Peter Thiel, in case the name doesn't immediately ring a bell, is the same person who co-founded Palantir - the data analytics company whose products are used by ICE, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and a growing number of foreign intelligence services (like in the EU and UAE as well 🙂) to conduct mass surveillance and build automated targeting systems for law enforcement and military operations.

So to recap: you hand your face and your government ID to a company bankrolled by the guy who built the infrastructure for state surveillance. On LinkedIn. Because you wanted a checkmark! Slaaay!

"But It's to Protect the Children!"

This is the line. This is always the line.

Every platform that rolls out invasive identity verification wraps it in child protection language because it's the one framing that's engineered to short-circuit critical thinking. You can't question it without sounding like you're against protecting children. It's a perfect rhetorical trap - an emotionally charged slogan designed to make you surrender your autonomy without asking what you're actually agreeing to.

LinkedIn doesn't even pretend this hard. They're a professional network. Children are not the problem LinkedIn is solving. LinkedIn's "Verified" is about linking your real-world legal identity to your professional online presence.

Discord at least had the decency to attempt the protect-the-children framing - they announced mandatory age verification in February 2026. They chose Persona as their vendor. The rollout lasted less than a month.

Researchers found that Persona's frontend code was exposed on a U.S. government-authorized Google Cloud server. They also discovered that Persona performs 269 distinct verification checks on each user - including screening against terrorism watchlists, politically exposed persons lists, and adverse media databases covering espionage categories. This for a chat app. To protect the children.

After massive backlash, Discord cut ties with Persona and quietly delayed the rollout.

The Checkmark Is the Product

Here's the thing nobody says out loud: age verification was never really about age. It's about binding your legal identity to your digital behavior at scale.

When you verify, you're not just proving you're over 18. You're providing:

• A government-issued ID (name, DOB, address, ID number)
• A biometric face scan
• Your device fingerprint
• Your IP address
• Possibly your location

Persona retains this data for up to 3 years. They file Suspicious Activity Reports directly with FinCEN (the US Treasury financial intelligence unit). They're FedRAMP Authorized, meaning US federal agencies can use their services. Let's also not ignore the fact that many companies like this will sell the data right before it expires to other parties, such as data brokers for pennies on the dollar. A tipical data broker makes about USD $700 per person anually. Google it. 🙂

Now connect that to LinkedIn: your professional history, your employment, your network, your communications, your endorsements, your career trajectory - all attached to a verified biometric identity, processed by a company that reports to federal financial intelligence and is approved for government use.

Your entire professional virtual persona is now linked to a single database.

And Then There's the OS

If you think this stays at the platform level, think again. California's AB 1043 - the Digital Age Assurance Act - was signed into law in October 2025. It requires operating system providers to collect user age at account setup and expose it via real-time API to app developers.

This covers Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and explicitly Linux distributions and Valve's SteamOS.

Brazil passed a similar law effective March 2026 explicitly naming operating systems and app stores. About half of all U.S. states have some version of an age verification law now. Nine passed in 2025 alone.

The operating system will verify you. Every app you install will be able to query it. Your MAC address, your IP, your device fingerprint, your face, your location, your government ID - all of it, available at the OS layer, queryable by every app you run, linked back to Persona or whoever wins the contract.

Think about what that means for cross-referencing. Your biometric identity. Your browsing and app behavior. Your location patterns. Your financial transactions. Your social graph. Your communication patterns. Your income and employment history from LinkedIn.

At some point that's not verification. That's a full-stack dossier on every human being operating a digital device, continuously updated, AI-queryable in real time.

You Are Not Hiding Anything - That's Not the Point

The argument I hate most is: "I have nothing to hide, but apparently you do!"

It's not about hiding. You lock your front door, don't you? You don't hand your house keys to everyone who walks by. That's because you understand that access to your personal space is power, and uncontrolled access to your private life by entities with unknown incentives and no accountability to you is a bad deal, full stop.

The people who designed these systems are not stupid. They know exactly what they're building. Mass-scale biometric identity verification tied to behavioral data tied to AI analysis is not a child safety system. It's the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in human history, being assembled piece by piece, justified at a rate of one emotionally resonant crisis at a time.

And once it's in place - once your face is in the database, once your OS is querying age APIs, once your verified identity is attached to your browsing patterns and your political views and your "adverse media" score - it doesn't come out.

When AI Runs the Kill Chain

Social media algorithms have been able to predict human behavior with frightening accuracy for over a decade. They know what you'll click before you do. They know what to show you, they measure how long you look at it, they measure your pupil dialation for dopamine reaction even. They know how to make you angry, scared, or convinced. They know your emotional patterns, your political leaning, your consumption habits, your relationships - and these AI systems have been trained on every thought you've ever typed, every chat you've sent, every photo you've posted. Heard of Big Data engineering?

Now that data is feeding AI systems that are considerably more capable than a recommendation algorithm.

Project Maven - the US military's algorithmic warfare program - has been running since 2017. Google built the first version and pulled out in 2018 after employees protested. Microsoft and Amazon took over. Palantir provides the data fusion layer. The system uses AI for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting. Here's a short presentation of it:

In February 2026, OpenAI signed a deal with the Department of Defense - hours after the Trump administration banned Anthropic from federal contracts and designated them a "supply chain risk." OpenAI literally called their announcement "Our Agreement with the Department of War." The deal covers both back-office operations and, explicitly, frontline warfighting.

Anthropic said no. OpenAI said yes.

And the system these contracts are building will be trained on - among other things - every verified identity, every behavioral profile, every communication pattern that has passed through the platforms that required you to verify.

You fed the training data and you verified yourself into it. So with how terrible ChatGPT objectively is at everything, don't be surprised when all of a sudden you live in a 1984 autoritative technocratic distopia in the best scenario.

What does this look like to you?

Deffinitely not technocratic rule - Photo: Alex Brandon, Boston Globe

Not to mention the strong posibility of the Minority Report type thing happening, which it kind of already does... Remember that Skynet came online in 2029?
Just by the way, do you think ChatGPT hard deletes conversations when you choose to delete them? 🤨

What To Do

I'm not telling you to delete your LinkedIn or whatever other app profile.

What I'm telling you is: understand what you're agreeing to. Be concious about the privacy policy of whatever identity vendor is processing you. Know that Persona and other companies like it exist, who backs them and what their interests are. Know that FedRAMP authorization means your data is legally usable by federal agencies. Know that the "protect the children" framing is a rhetorical device, not a description of the actual system being built.

Be mad about it. Not tinfoil-hat mad - informed, precise, articulate mad. Inform others!
Because half the infrastructure for even beyond what Orwell described is already in place, it's just distributed across enough corporate brands that it doesn't look like one thing.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, remember?

And you just verified yourself into it. ✅

A time is coming where every one of us will need to make a conscious choice, and it's coming very soon: do we take the blue pill and say "yes master" 🔵 - or do we take the red pill, face the facts, and sing along to Rage Against the Machine's famous BBC performance? 🔴

What say you, human?

Live long and prosper. 🖖👽