LinkedIn doesn’t get explicit consent for training AI, requiring users to opt out.
Yet another major tech company is training AI models with user data—by default—and not informing users first. Following in the footsteps of Meta and X’s Grok, LinkedIn is opting users into training its AI, as well as models belonging to unnamed “affiliates.”
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which also owns a large chunk of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, meaning the Redmond, Washington tech giant will also be training its AI with information from the business-focused social network. After publication, LinkedIn clarified that user data will not be used to train base OpenAI models, but will be shared with Microsoft for its own OpenAI software.
According to LinkedIn: “The artificial intelligence models that LinkedIn uses to power generative AI features may be trained by LinkedIn or another provider. For example, some of our models are provided by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service.”
Spokesperson Greg Snapper added, “We leverage OpenAI models made available through Microsoft’s Azure AI Service like other customers or users of that API service. And when we use the models made available through that service, we are not sending data back to OpenAI for them to train their models.”
“The opt-out model proves once again to be wholly inadequate to protect our rights.”
Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer at the Open Rights Group
“Where LinkedIn trains generative AI models, we seek to minimize personal data in the data sets used to train the models, including by using privacy enhancing technologies to redact or remove personal data from the training dataset.” The platform added it is not training “content-generating AI models” on data from the EU, EEA or Switzerland. The EEA is the European Economic Area, which includes all 27 EU members and Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.
If you’re in a country where LinkedIn has started using your data for AI training, it’s easy to stop it. Go to the data privacy section in settings and switch the “Use my data for training content creation AI models” toggle to off.
Privacy activists, though, remain alarmed by LinkedIn’s decision to opt users into training multiple AI models. Mariano delli Santi, legal and policy officer at U.K.-based privacy advocacy nonprofit the Open Rights Group, told Forbes: “The opt-out model proves once again to be wholly inadequate to protect our rights: the public cannot be expected to monitor and chase every single online company that decides to use our data to train AI. Opt-in consent isn’t only legally mandated, but a common-sense requirement.”
He urged the U.K. privacy watchdog to “take urgent action against LinkedIn and other companies that think they are above the law.”
This story was originally published on forbes.com.
