LinkedIn may have trained AI on your data
LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, has allegedly been collecting user data on its platform without informing users first. The Microsoft-owned company has now updated its terms of service to reflect this, but it will continue to automatically log users in unless they manually find and disable the setting to opt out. Several netizens took to social media platforms to criticize the company’s move. The updated policy specifically emphasizes that the AI is being trained for features such as writing suggestions and post recommendations.
LinkedIn allegedly trained AI on user data without disclosure
A 404 Media report highlighted LinkedIn’s data scraping before the company updated its policy to inform users of its action. Many users also placed on the platform on Wednesday announcing that they have found a new option in the settings about data training for AI.
Training AI models on user data is not a new practice. Previously, Meta allowed to train its internal Llama models on publicly available user messages, and Google has its policy last year to train Gemini and other AI models on publicly available web data. The biggest concern with LinkedIn, however, is that it began collecting user data before publicly informing users.
Generally, platforms are expected to share prior notice of such decisions so that they can proactively opt out and protect their privacy. LinkedIn’s decision not to follow this protocol has led netizens to take to social media platforms to criticize the move.
However, LinkedIn now has the policy to reflect the change. It now explains that “LinkedIn or its partners train or refine generative AI models that are used to create content, including content that may be distributed or made available on LinkedIn’s platform.” The Microsoft-owned company also revealed that the training was done for AI-powered writing assistants and post-recommendation features.
LinkedIn earlier told TechCrunch reported that the company used privacy-enhancing techniques to limit the collection of personal information used to train generative AI models. Some of the measures included redacting and removing personal and identifying information.
To prevent LinkedIn from scraping data on the platform, users can click the button here to open the settings option and turn it off. However, it is not certain whether the social media platform will also delete all previously collected data from the AI models’ datasets.
