What ID verification proves, and what it does not

Every freelancer who applies to a job here has had a government ID checked by a person. That is worth something specific, and it is worth being precise about what.

What we check

Somebody on our side looks at a government ID and at a photograph of the person holding it, and compares the two. If they match and the document looks genuine, the profile is verified.

At that moment four fields lock: first name, last name, date of birth and gender. They cannot be edited afterwards. Changing them takes an administrator, requires a reason, and is written to an audit log.

What that buys you

• The person you are talking to is the person on the document.
• Their name cannot quietly change after you have agreed terms.
• Nobody can apply to your job without having passed it.

What it does not prove

It is not a background check, a credit check or a criminal record search. It says nothing about whether somebody is good at the work, whether they will hit a deadline, or whether the portfolio is theirs.

Those remain yours to assess, and the rest of a profile exists to help you: rated skills with the month somebody started using each one, work history, an optional sixty-second video intro, and a median reply time once there are enough replies to compute one honestly.

Identity is the one thing a platform can check on your behalf. Judgement is not.

Why the wording is careful

Profiles here are self-published. A freelancer writes their own and it goes live without anybody approving the words. So we say "ID verified", we mean the ID check, and we do not imply that somebody reviewed the work. If we ever do review work, we will say that instead.

The freelancer-facing side of the same process is on the features page.