You don’t have to let social media services harvest your data to train their generative AI, as many companies do these days. You can opt out—if you can figure out how. The problem was hammered home last week when tech news site 404Media reported that LinkedIn had started training its AI on its users’ posts by default,

LinkedIn appears to have begun scraping user data to train generative AI models before updating its privacy policy.

Once you are logged into LinkedIn’s website in your browser, click on “Settings and Privacy” under the “Me” tab. Then select “Data Privacy.” From there, look under the “How LinkedIn uses your data” header. At the bottom, you’ll find “Data for Generative AI Improvement.” Click on that and toggle the switch to “Off” to opt out.

The U.K.'s data protection watchdog has confirmed that Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has stopped processing user data for AI model training for now. Stephen

LinkedIn is trawling your profile and posts and using the information as a teaching tool for its AI. You can stop it.

The data collected for the Generative AI Improvement program is used to “improve or develop the LinkedIn services,” LinkedIn said.

The UK's data watchdog said it raised concerns over LinkedIn's approach to using UK data to train AI.

No matter how morally or even legally murky AI data scraping is, companies just can't seem to stop. The latest culprit is the job-finding social media platform LinkedIn.