How does AI become more effective and smarter? Like humans, the answer is knowledge. But where does that knowledge come from? For humans, it comes from books. It comes from interacting with people. It comes from doing things and taking away lessons from them. For AI, it’s kind of the same, where companies rely on books, photos, and postings on the internet to train their models. This is why it’s not surprising that LinkedIn wants to use your data to train its AI . Thankfully, you can opt out of it.
LinkedIn wants to train AI using your data
According to an announcement on LinkedIn’s help page , the company revealed its plans to use your data to train content-generating AI models. The company says, “ This may include data like details from your profile and public content you post on LinkedIn; it does not include your private messages. We rely on legitimate interest to process your data for this purpose .”
However, the good news is that you don’t have to participate in it if you don’t want to. LinkedIn also says, “ You can opt out anytime in your settings if you’d prefer not to have your data used in this way. ”
LinkedIn won’t be the first or last company to leverage its user data to train AI models. For instance, Meta recently proposed using your uploaded Facebook photos to train its models. Anthropic also revealed that your conversations with its Claude AI are also being used to train and improve the model.
Thankfully, for the most part, a lot of companies give users the option to opt out of this. It won’t always be easy, as the settings might be buried, but it’s there if you dig around a bit. It’s good that there is an opt-out feature. We’re already seeing how some companies and groups are suing AI developers, accusing them of using their data without permission . We’re sure this isn’t something LinkedIn or Microsoft wants.
How to opt-out of LinkedIn using your data
If you’re uncomfortable with LinkedIn using your data for training, you can choose not to participate in it. It’s pretty easy and straightforward.
Just log into your LinkedIn account, go to Settings & Privacy, select Data Privacy, and click on Data for Generative AI Improvement. From there, make sure to toggle off “Use my data for training content creation AI models,” and you should be good to go.
You’ll also want to make sure to act fast. This is because until you toggle it off, your existing one will be used. And even if you turn off the feature, it won’t remove data that’s already been processed, only new data.
