LinkedIn admitted September 18th stealing your data (posts, career details, etc.) for AI purposes. Yes, you can opt now but you cannot retrieve your stolen data from before.

Impact of stolen data

By stealing your data, AI can now reproduce your LinkedIn posts and blogs for someone else. Wrote a post about your insights on widgets? Someone using ChatGPT can now get that information and reproduce it as their own. And your pictures. And your videos.

This comes on top of AI companies scraping your business web site and blogs for data training.

Impact of AI on small business

I have written before about the perils of AI for small business. Now your professional LinkedIn data is the hands of hackers and people using your data to push their business and career.

How to opt out of new data theft

After logging in to LinkedIn, click on your profile picture and go to Settings. In Settings, click on Data Privacy on the left hand side menu. Then click on Data for Generative AI Improvement. Turn off data theft.

I think LinkedIn should rename Data privacy to Data Piracy.

Why steal the data?

Besides the fact the AI companies have stolen data from uncounted artists and writers already, LinkedIn had to grab that data before numerous countries legislate against such data theft. If Trudeau’s minority government survives the next 6 months, the Canadian bill should go before parliament.

AI companies also need more and more fresh data to train their LLM (long language models). Microsoft who owns LinkedIn is heavily invested in OpenAI (the not for profit soon to be for profit AI company).

Quit drinking the AI kool aid

The average small business owner has been overwhelmed by the marketing frenzy around AI and AI business tools. If you want to read unbiased technical and financial analysis about AI, I highly recommend Ed Zitron’s newsletter, https://www.wheresyoured.at and this blog https://www.wheresyoured.at/put-up-or-shut-up/ .

LinkedIn: welcome to professional data theft

Opt out of the LinkedIn’s data theft. And watch for other tech vendors changing their terms of service to retroactively steal your data.