I cannot access my LinkedIn account, and it might be a good thing.
TL;DR: I have a LinkedIn profile, which is currently incomplete. Something triggered aggressive protection measures that locked me out of my account; demanding I upload government ID to get back in! For obvious reasons, I will never comply with ID verification.
I may be permanently locked out of my LinkedIn account, and will post an update if it should be disregarded (by you) and deleted (by me).
The full blog post:
Recently, I created a LinkedIn profile, on the advice of career advisors, knowing that this is a useful place to connect with people and employers. Upon joining, I was pleasantly surprised to find I could sign up with an email alias and nothing else. No phone number, no mandatory two factor authentication. I'm fine with providing recovery measures, but seeing them not-mandatory gave me some hope about this platform - as did all the privacy and advertising settings being easily accessible and well organized. It's great being able to disable algorithmic feeds.
Upon creating my account, I was given a list of people I might know and connected with a couple dozen. Seeing public profiles of people I know, with the sense of "everyone I know is here!" brought up some interesting feelings for me, as I haven't used traditional "social media" in years. In short, I don't have an Instagram, TikTok or Snapchat account, and I've never searched Fecesbook (the correct way to address it) for names of people I know, even though many of us have accounts there under our full names. I mostly spend time on social networks that grow organically through association and connecting with people through shared experiences, like Signal, Discord, and Steam.
In essence, LinkedIn is Corporate Facebook. We all know it, and for those of us trying to expand our presence, that's exactly why we want to be there! I was genuinely optimistic about networking on LinkedIn and providing another option for a public profile where people can see who I am, what I do, what I would like to do, and what I believe in.
Being locked out of LinkedIn has only reaffirmed my belief in the free web. But let's talk about this message, and how this happened.
When signing up for LinkedIn, I had to choose where to access this website. To many people this sounds like a strange question - in your browser, right? Some people might even download the app. As a privacy conscious user, I wondered "do I open this in my regular browser, in a container tab, or in a different browser?" The answer was simple - I have a browser dedicated to quarantining big tech websites, and I opened LinkedIn there. It all went swimmingly until the first time I was prompted to log in, a few days after first creating my account.
Most websites use 'fingerprinting' to uniquely identify your exact browser out of millions, using information that your browser leaks as you go, like screen resolution, user agent, fonts, timezones, etc. This is unnnecessary surveillance, but it's how the web is, and sites like LinkedIn and Google use your browser fingerprint as one of many ways of confirming your identity when you try to log in. The browser I'm using for LinkedIn has robust anti-fingerprinting protections. I also signed up using an email alias instead of my real personal email address. Between these two things, I can see how their protection mechanisms were tripped - even if I believe their implementation is poor and overly strict, not to mention the only resolution being ID verification.
This is why I hate services with automated protection systems. Privacy conscious users appear suspicious. The internet is for humans, not robots. Sites do have to defend themselves against an onslaught of clankers, and there are many open source tools for doing this, such as Anubis. This is an automated protection system, to be fair. But when tech companies set out to achieve the same goal, they go about it in a way that degrades the humans the platform allegedly exists to serve. ID verification. Google's reCAPTCHA replacement that locks you out of websites unless you have a mobile device with google services. I digress.
I did a quick search to see if there was any information on how to get around this LinkedIn ID verification wall ("Access to your account has been temporarily restricted", for anyone in the same situation) and the only information I came across was the ironic contents of this image.
So here's my solution: Dial back the ad+tracker blocking and fingerprinting protections on my browser, and try again in a few days. If I can change my email address, I'll do that too, but of course, that's currently impossible.
If you prefer to use protection for your browsing activities (such as Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection, Brave Shields, Ublock Origin, Blokada, AdGuard, or Safing Portmaster), you learn to dial back these protections in the rare case they might be causing a website to not function. So this is a pretty normal step. Will it be enough? Will the LinkedIn wall time out? Only time will tell.
What happens if I can't get back in? I stay off LinkedIn. I contact them and request that they delete my account. If I can stay on LinkedIn, great. If I must leave, that's fine too.
It's why I have this website - which was extremely easy to set up. Never hand over your life to a faceless digital landlord that can wipe you off the face of the Earth with no recourse. This experience reaffirmed my belief in the free web - the parts of the internet where you have some control and ownership. The parts free from censorship and surveillance, including ID verification and age verification. The parts that just feel more human, created by fellow humans who just want a friendly place for each other to thrive.
That's where I'm going to build my online presence. Right here. And no matter what happens on LinkedIn, this site isn't going anywhere. Welcome!