Identity Hijacking: When Your LinkedIn Profile Becomes the Company’s Property

The case of LinkedIn perfectly illustrates this logic of appropriating the personal sphere for organizational aims. Originally conceived as a tool for individual professional networking—a “cloud-based resume” to manage one’s career autonomously—LinkedIn has, in recent years, been progressively repurposed by companies as a lever for business development and communication through their employees.

When an organization asks its employees to use their personal LinkedIn accounts to “communicate corporate updates” or “prospect clients,” it performs a usage shift that can be described as identity hijacking. The employee becomes an involuntary communications agent, a mobile advertising trail; their personal network is transformed into a commercial database, and their digital identity is progressively colonized by the company’s brand image, leaving deep and lasting marks.

This “identity hijacking” is not limited to a one-off appropriation of the LinkedIn profile by the employer: it is part of a broader dynamic of digital “deterritorialization” (Deleuze, 1980) of identity and of a paradigm shift that fuses private and professional life. The individual is gradually stripped of control over their public and personal representation, which becomes a tool of symbolic governance.

This appropriation reveals a deeper process of identity substitution, far beyond mere repurposing. It fits into what Rouvroy and Berns (2013) describe as a digital biopolitics of identity, where the individual increasingly loses control over their professional self-image. Identity becomes a field of negotiation: the individual believes they are expressing their personal expertise while, in fact, they are feeding an organizational narrative that replaces their own. This substitution operates incrementally: supposedly “spontaneous” posts begin to align with the company’s communication strategy; opinions conform to corporate positions; new connections serve business objectives.

The employee’s expertise, personal commitments, likes, and even private posts become integrated into a corporatist narrative that gradually takes precedence. The individual becomes an involuntary contributor to a story they no longer author, blurring the line between personal identity and organizational representation. The employee is no longer just a “representative”: they become an influence platform serving organizational alignment.

This practice raises several critical issues. First, it creates a patrimonial asymmetry: content generated by the employee on their personal account enhances the company’s relational and communicational capital, but these digital assets do not follow the employee if they change jobs.

Second, it generates identity contamination: the individual can no longer clearly distinguish between their own expertise and the employer’s communication strategy.

Finally, it creates systemic dependency: maintaining an “active” LinkedIn profile becomes an implicit requirement, turning connection and profile management into covert working hours.

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