Indeed

Is Indeed safe?

Indeed itself is fairly secure: there is no known breach, and it has paid outside researchers to find flaws since 2017. The danger is the people on it. Job search sites are where many fake employers find their victims, and Indeed, as the largest one, gets more than its share. We score it 57/100, nine points ahead of LinkedIn (48), which has a large GDPRGDPRThe EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which sets rules on how organisations collect and use personal data and allows large fines.More in the glossary fine and trains AI on profiles by default.

The other catch is privacy. Indeed shows your resume to employers by default, records everything you do on the site, and shares data with employers and advertisers in ways California law counts as a sale.

How common are job scams?

Very. Americans reported losing $501 million to job and employment agency scams in 2024, up from $90 million in 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission, and the number of reports tripled over the same period. These figures cover all job scams, not only those that began on Indeed.

The fastest-growing kind is the "task scam". You are offered paid remote work rating products or liking videos, earn a few small payments, and are then asked to deposit your own money, often in crypto, to unlock bigger earnings that never come. The FTC counted about 20,000 reports of these in the first half of 2024, against none in 2020. Fake recruiters often make first contact by text or WhatsApp; the FTC's advice is to ignore unexpected job messages there, because real employers do not recruit that way.

Indeed does remove a lot of fake accounts. Its transparency report for January to June 2026 says it proactively removed more than 218,000 accounts, and users reported more than 12,000 more. More than 72,000 were taken down before they received any applications, which means many others were live long enough to reach job seekers. Its terms are frank about the limits: Indeed "does not guarantee the identity of an Employer", and job seekers are "solely responsible" for checking that an offer is real.

Who sees your resume?

When you create an Indeed profile it is set to "Employers can find you" by default. That lets employers search your resume, see when you were last active, and contact you, and it creates a public profile link. Anyone posing as an employer can use the same search.

Switching to "Employers can't find you" keeps your resume private until you apply. After that, the employer has it, and Indeed says the employer's own policies govern what happens next. Deleting your Indeed account does not pull your resume back from companies you applied to.

What Indeed does with your data

Apple's label for the Indeed app has no "Data Used to Track You" section and no third-party advertising purpose, which is cleaner than most big apps. The privacy policy, updated in October 2026, goes further than the label:

• Indeed records which pages you visit and where you click, scroll and hover, sometimes in real time, including in private browsing mode.
• It lists identifiers, site activity and approximate location (city or zip code) as "sold" or shared under California law with employers, affiliates and advertisers, and uses ad partners such as Google, Beeswax and LiveRamp, plus Google and Facebook cookies, to target ads.
• It uses personal data to train AI models, and employers can ask Indeed's AI to summarise your application and give you a match score against their criteria. Indeed says humans make the final hiring decisions.
• An optional "My Jobs" feature scans a linked email inbox for application updates, including applications made outside Indeed.

You can opt out of sales and targeted ads through Indeed's US rights form or by phone, and ask for deletion; Indeed reports 66,870 deletion requests in the first half of 2026.

How to job hunt safely on Indeed

1. Set your profile to "Employers can't find you" unless you want recruiters to contact you.
2. Remove your home address and personal phone number from the resume you upload.
3. Never pay for equipment, training, a background check or a "deposit" to start a job.
4. Keep conversations inside Indeed messages; treat a sudden move to WhatsApp, Telegram or text as a warning sign.
5. Use a unique password, and turn on two-step login in your account's security settings if it is offered to you.
6. Report suspicious jobs with the "report job" link on the posting.

How we scored it

Regulatory record (88) is Indeed's strongest factor, with no privacy fine or order found. Security (62) reflects a clean breach record and a long-running bug bounty; we could not confirm which two-step options job seekers get. Privacy (44) is the weakest, because resumes are visible by default, activity is fully recorded and data is shared with advertisers. Scams and harmful content (48) is close behind: fake employers and job scams are the main way people get hurt on job sites, and Indeed's own figures show how many get through.