Social networking site for professionals LinkedIn was reportedly scraping user data on the platform without notifying users first. The Microsoft-owned company has now updated its terms of service to reflect this, however, it continues to automatically opt-in users unless they manually change the setting to opt-out. They don’t stop after finding the form. Many netizens took to social media platforms to criticize the company’s move. Notably, the updated policy highlights that AI is being trained for features like writing suggestions and posting recommendations.
LinkedIn reportedly trained AI on user data without notice
404 Media reports highlighted LinkedIn’s data scraping before the company updated its policy informing users of its action. Several users also posted on the platform on Wednesday claiming that they had found a new option in Settings regarding data training for AI.
Training AI models on user data is not a new practice. Previously, Meta admitted to training its in-house Llama model on publicly available user posts, and Google admitted to training its Gemini and other AI models last year on publicly available web data. The policy was updated. However, the bigger concern with LinkedIn is that it started collecting user data before users reported it publicly.
Generally, platforms are expected to share prior information about such decisions because they can proactively opt out and protect their privacy. LinkedIn’s move to not follow this protocol has resulted in netizens taking to the social media platform to criticize the move.
However, LinkedIn has now updated the policy to reflect the change. It now clarifies that “LinkedIn or its affiliates train or fine-tune generator 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 training was done for the AI-powered writing assistant as well as the post-recommendation features.
LinkedIn previously told TechCrunch that the company had used privacy-enhancing techniques to limit the collection of personal information that was used to train generative AI models. Some measures include modifying and deleting personal and identifying information.
To prevent LinkedIn from scraping data on the platform, users can click here to access the Settings option and turn it off. However, it is not certain whether the social media platform will also remove all previously collected data from the AI model’s dataset.
