In this Help Net Security interview, Oscar Rodriguez, VP Trust Product at LinkedIn, discusses how verification is becoming a portable trust signal across the internet. He explains how LinkedIn is extending professional identity beyond its platform to address rising AI-driven fraud, impersonation, and online scams.
Rodriguez also outlines how LinkedIn views its role in digital trust alongside platforms, partners, and existing identity systems.
LinkedIn is positioning verification as a foundational trust signal not just on its own platform, but across the broader internet and emerging LLM ecosystems. From a trust architecture perspective, what problem are you trying to solve here that existing identity or reputation systems have failed to address?
With the rise of GenAI, it has become increasingly difficult to determine what and who is authentic online. The impact of this is huge. Fake profiles and online scams cost businesses around $60 billion a year.
As digital interactions continue to be central to the workplace, we’re committed to LinkedIn being the most trusted platform for professional interactions, and extending that trust beyond LinkedIn.
Professionals are embracing verification on LinkedIn, and we see 75 members verify every minute. We now have over 100 million members with verifications, which provide authenticity signals to help them build trust.
Through Verified on LinkedIn, members can take those trust signals further across the internet. This helps users avoid repeating lengthy verification processes on every platform they use and allows others to see their LinkedIn verification status. For platforms, this offers a way to indicate that their users have completed an additional verification step, adding another layer of reassurance.
So whether you’re joining a meeting, leaving a product review, showcasing your portfolio, or testing someone’s UX design, people who see your profile will know that you have been verified through LinkedIn. It gives members a way to carry the credibility they’ve established on LinkedIn into the other digital spaces they participate in.
The new self-serve API effectively externalizes LinkedIn’s trust signals to third-party platforms. What guardrails are in place to prevent misuse, over-reliance, or false equivalence, where a LinkedIn verification is treated as a blanket proxy for trust in very different contexts?
Partners should use LinkedIn Verifications as a tool in their broader trust and safety toolkit. Verifications provide additional trust signals and should be used thoughtfully by partner platforms to increase trust and protect against misuse and misrepresentation.
We encourage all our partners to link to the member’s LinkedIn profile and verifications details so that viewers can inspect more details and make informed decisions about the people and companies they interact with.
LinkedIn sits at an unusual intersection of professional identity, employment data, and now cross-platform trust. How do you think about your role compared to governments, identity providers, or decentralized identity initiatives in shaping the future of digital identity?
With 1.3 billion members, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. As we deliver on our mission of connecting the world’s professionals, we are focused on building trusted communities by helping people engage with real people, jobs and companies.
Having verified information on profiles can help people make more informed decisions about who they interact with on LinkedIn. LinkedIn offers several types of verification, including identity verification, workplace verification, educational institution verification, verification badges on job posts, verification for recruiters, and verification for organizations. Our verification badge signals that specific information has been confirmed, giving our members more confidence in who they are interacting with.
But we are clear that our role is not to replace the function of governments and formal identity providers in confirming legal identification. We see our role as helping our members to take the trust they have built on LinkedIn to other platforms they might use.
Through partnerships such as our new integration with Zoom, members can display these trust signals, which helps others evaluate the authenticity and trustworthiness of the person they are meeting or working with. And for platforms, this offers a way to indicate that their users have completed additional verification steps, providing another layer of reassurance.
LinkedIn verification is now being positioned as portable across platforms like Zoom. What threat models were most influential in driving this decision, impersonation, deepfakes, social engineering, or something else entirely?
The rise of GenAI is increasing the risk of all those threat models. We know there is currently heightened concern around impersonation and the use of deepfakes in particular. Verified on LinkedIn allows members to use the credibility they have built on LinkedIn, and take that onto other ecosystems they use.
By integrating LinkedIn’s verification tools, companies like Zoom can display verified details, like a user’s identity or workplace, directly within their platforms. This helps give other users better information about the people they’re engaging with.
How do you ensure that the success of verification is not measured solely by engagement, but by actual reductions in fraud, impersonation, or harmful interactions?
We take actions every day to keep professionals safe on our platform. This includes shutting down more than 80 million fake accounts at registration, and blocking 99.7% of detected fake accounts proactively before they are reported by a member.
By continuing to expand our Verified on LinkedIn network, we are aiming to take that commitment further across the internet and help professionals to demonstrate authenticity in every interaction.