You might want to turn off LinkedIn's A.I. data scraping option

If ChatGPT starts asking you about your *shudder* endorsements any time soon, we now have at least half an idea why: U.S. users of “social media site for co-workers you don’t want to be actual friends with” LinkedIn have noticed some quirks in the company’s plans to scrape user data for A.I. training lately. As reported by 404 Media and Tech Crunch, LinkedIn has come under criticism this week, not just because the basic practice of using user data to train its algorithm, which it’s been doing for the past year or two, is gross—it is, but in a “Ugh, everybody’s doing it lately” kind of way—but because the Microsoft-owned service didn’t update its terms of use to let users know about it, or how to opt out.

We highlight “U.S. users” in the above paragraph because our privacy protections are crappier than a lot of other countries: Users in the EU, for instance, don’t have to worry about this stuff. For its Stateside users, though, LinkedIn has gone with the popular (for tech companies) “opt out” approach to handling data issues like this; which is to say, you have to go in to your settings and say “Please don’t feed my information to LinkedBot, The Robot Who Eats Resumés For Fuel,” or it’s assumed that you’re fine with having your data cheerfully chowed down on. To be mildly fair, LinkedIn updated its terms of service to mention the data use this week, i.e., after everybody yelled at them for not mentioning this in those policies. But it’s still being called out as an example of tech companies exploiting user unawareness in order to get more yummy data to feed to its robots. So, yeah; might want to go in and turn that particular setting off.

As to what LinkedIn is using your data for, it sounds like it’s mostly for its own internal tools, like the algorithms it uses to suggest post topics to users.  (“Hey, fellow fleshlings! Who hates getting someone’s “Special Skills” section stuck in their teeth?!”) But its shiny new privacy policy does note that it’s also allowed to share your users with “affiliates,” including Microsoft, to “provide or develop their services,” so they’re presumably sharing the love around.