Summarised by Centrist
In a blog post on 18 September this year, LinkedIn, the social media platform for professionals, owned by Microsoft, admitted it automatically uses personal data to train AI models for things like post suggestions and its writing assistant.
This was quietly included in an updated privacy policy with an opt-out option, but users weren’t clearly informed.
The platform says it’s using privacy-enhancing technologies to limit personal data in its training sets, but that’s cold comfort for those unaware their data is being used.
Notably, LinkedIn confirmed that users in the European Union, Switzerland, and the UK are not having their data used for AI model training. For everyone else, though, it’s business as usual—unless you dive into your settings to switch off the “data for generative AI improvement.”
Other tech giants like Meta recently announced it will resume using public content to train its own AI models in the UK.
Privacy advocate Mariano delli Santi from the Open Rights Group calls the opt-out system inadequate. “The public cannot be expected to monitor and chase every single online company,” he said.
