Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.
The Local Stack: “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.
Wait, What Other Company? When you click “verify” on LinkedIn, you’re not giving your passport to LinkedIn. You get redirected to a company called Persona.
Full name: Persona Identities, Inc. Based in San Francisco, California.
- LinkedIn is their client. You are the face being scanned.
- I had never heard of Persona before this. Most people haven’t. That’s kind of the point — they sit invisibly between you and the platforms you trust.
- So I downloaded their privacy policy (18 pages) and their terms of service (16 pages). Here’s what I found.
Everything I Gave Them – For a three-minute identity check, this is what Persona collected:
- My full name — first, middle, last
- My passport photo — the full document, both sides, all data on the face of it
- My selfie — a photo of my face taken in real-time
- My facial geometry — biometric data extracted from both images, used to match the selfie to the passport
- My NFC chip data — the digital info stored on the chip inside my passport
- My national ID number
- My nationality, sex, birthdate, age
- My email, phone number, postal address
- My IP address, device type, MAC address, browser, OS version, language
- My geolocation — inferred from my IP
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.
They Also Called Their Friends – Persona didn’t just use what I gave them. They went and cross-referenced me against what they call their “global network of trusted third-party data sources”:
- Government databases
- National ID registries
- Consumer credit agencies
- Utility companies
- Mobile network providers
- Postal address databases
I scanned my passport for a checkmark. They ran a background check….”
Media Ratings Site NewsGuard Sues Trump FTC
Deadline: “Claims Unconstitutional Effort “To Censor Speech” – “NewsGuard, the news media rating service, filed suit against the Federal Trade Commission and its chairman Andrew Ferguson on Friday, alleging that the agency was using its regulatory authority to stifle its speech.
The service, launched in 2018 by Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, employs a team of journalists to review the reliability of news sites and give them a score of 0-100, information that is used by consumers and clients including AI companies, search engines, news aggregators, brands and researchers.
Ferguson has targeted NewsGuard, suggesting that it violated antitrust laws and that it was biased, as NewsGuard had given a low score to Newsmax, the conservative news site.
In the lawsuit, NewsGuard claimed that Ferguson has engaged in a campaign extending almost a year “to impose their view of speech nirvana” on the service. The ratings service also claimed that, in the FTC approval of the merger of Omnicom and Interpublic Group, conditions were placed on the combined company that prohibits them from subscribing or relying on NewsGuard.
The merger condition bars Omnicom from doing business with any entity that engages in the “veracity of news reporting or other politically or ideologically contested facts, such as their characterization as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation, ‘bias’ or similar terms.” The provision was added after Newsmax urged a revision to a draft merger order, the lawsuit noted.
The FTC “is brazenly using its power not for any issue concerning trade or commerce, but rather to censor speech. And it has done so simply out of disagreement with NewsGuard’s First Amendment-protected journalistic judgments about the reliability of news sources,” NewsGuard’s attorneys, led by Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote in the lawsuit…”