CLEAR Used by LinkedIn: A Terrible Example of Unfriendly Service Implementation

 

LinkedIn uses a service called CLEAR (clearme.com) for profile verification. It involves the use of government-issued IDs like passports and facial recognition. Personally, this is one of the most inconvenient and unfriendly services I’ve ever encountered.

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If the verification succeeds in one attempt, it might seem like a very convenient service. However, the problem arises when the verification fails for some unknown reason. I attempted to verify myself using my passport, which included an unedited photo of me, and my passport name matches my LinkedIn profile name exactly. The photo was taken less than six months ago. I’ve used various services that combine ID and facial recognition for verification, and I’ve always passed without issue. Yet CLEAR relentlessly returned a "failure."

 

We weren't able to verify your identity

Your Personal Information could not be confirmed.

This is what they say. But what exactly is the problem? Is my name incorrect? Is my passport not supported? Did my photo verification fail? They don’t tell me what the issue is at all.

 

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If you go to the Help section on LinkedIn’s website, there are some troubleshooting guides for verification failures. They list various reasons why verification might fail. That’s right. They are simply listed, nothing more.

 

 

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I must have encountered one of these issues and failed the verification. But is it really that difficult to explain why? Is there some kind of security issue involved? Are they trying to prevent someone from exploiting the reason to attempt a false verification? That’s a completely absurd idea.

 

From the very start, CLEAR provides little to no guidance during the verification process. It asks for a passport, and as soon as you bring the camera to the passport, it “hastily” takes a photo. The camera was clearly moving, and there must have been motion blur. I doubt they have the technology to detect such issues. A photo taken in such a rushed manner is highly likely to cause OCR failure. Since they didn’t provide any information, I can’t know for sure, but because I’m confident in my information and photo, I suspect they failed to properly recognize my name on the passport.

 

However, users can't confirm that information. It defies the basic logic of any service that uses OCR. Most well-designed verification systems allow us to confirm the information they use for verification because their so-called AI-based text extraction systems are never perfect. The fact that they can't be perfect is an obvious truth, as even humans can't always be certain. Text recognition from a photo taken in real-time can fail due to factors like motion blur, lighting, or debris. That's why well-designed systems let users confirm the recognized information, correct it manually if it's wrong, or, if they don’t want user intervention, at least let them retake the photo.

 

But this poorly designed service called CLEAR simply spits out a failure message saying, "We can't do it." What can't you do? Why? If you tell me, I could help make it work. The fact that there’s no guidance whatsoever on how to solve the issue is truly astonishing. The only thing we can try is taking the photo again. Did the facial recognition fail? If so, multiple photos could potentially fix it, but that doesn't seem to be the case. If they failed to recognize my name in the first place, even if I take a thousand photos, the problem won’t be solved.

 

We’re left with no choice but to visit clearme.com, which isn’t even mentioned in the guidance. Neither LinkedIn nor CLEAR offers any help with the failure. And when you visit CLEAR’s website, it's a mess. There’s no menu dedicated to helping frustrated customers, just advertisements for their paid membership. They do have a useless chatbot, but it only gives irrelevant and powerless responses.

 

 

If, as this explanation suggests, the failure was due to an issue with syncing information with the telecom provider from the start, why do they make us take photos agian and again? Doesn't that imply the issue has nothing to do with facial recognition? This service not only fails to work properly, but it also confuses people and wastes unnecessary time.

 

I've decided to give up on LinkedIn verification. While this is a loss for me, it's also a loss for LinkedIn. If LinkedIn wanted more people to verify their profiles, they should have partnered with a better service.

 

I don’t want this service holding on to my personal information. So I tried to delete my account, but even finding the option to do so is difficult. It makes me seriously question whether their goal is to simply collect my personal data and make it difficult to delete.

 

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After a long struggle, I realized that I could delete my account through customer service. Privacy laws in the U.S. may be lenient, but in some strict countries, making it harder to delete information than to input it is illegal.