Job platforms monetize digital identities as privacy awareness lags: study

Digital platforms have co-opted the onerous task of job hunting, but according to new research many job seekers don’t realise their personal data is being sold.

In the age of online friendships, algorithmic entertainment and digital dating, there’s much we willingly provide to online platforms in exchange for a service. A wealth of personal details are volunteered but it is becoming ever more apparent how commoditized our digital identities have become.

Popular job platforms such as Indeed and LinkedIn sell user data, but a significant proportion (37 percent) of Incogni’s respondents believe job-search platforms only share user data with potential employers.

“It’s hard to focus on data privacy when you are worried about putting food on the table, but our research suggests that there are real risks associated with these sites,” says Darius Belejevas, head of Incogni.

“Only seven percent of our survey respondents expressed concern about sharing their personal information with job search platforms; that is a shocking indictment of the lack of education about privacy risk in the U.S.”

Incogni’s research was structured around the question of whether these job-search platforms are taking advantage of job seekers for their personal data. Incogni’s researchers surveyed a thousand Americans who used such platforms in the past five years and investigated the most popular digital job platforms to find out.

Incogni reports that nearly 40 percent of job seekers said they never delete the profiles they create on job-search platforms, while more than 34 percent of those surveyed said they uploaded their details to more than two platforms. A quarter of respondents believe that these details are not sensitive information even as resumes can contain names, addresses, phone numbers, veteran status and more.

Incogni went through the privacy policies of platforms including Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, among others, as well as their data security histories. Incogni says that according to the CCPA definition of a data sale, eight out of the nine investigated job-search and networking platforms sell user data.

As job seekers increasingly rely on these digital platforms, it means ever more personal information is being used to train AI models, collected and shared. For example, LinkedIn is using its users’ profile information, job updates, comments and posts to train generative AI models. Users must opt out via their privacy settings, rather than this being the default, to stop this use of their data.

Incogni’s full report on job seekers’ personal data and job-search platforms can be found here.

Article Topics

data brokers  |  data protection  |  digital identity  |  identity security  |  Incognia