I don’t know about you but I have started paying a lot more attention to those innocuous looking emails advising me of “minor updates to our user terms and conditions”.
This message I received this morning from LinkedIn, thank you Microsoft.
At this time, we are not enabling training for generative AI on member data from the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. For those outside these regions, we’ve proactively made available an opt-out setting for any members who choose not to make this information available for this purpose.
I recommend you do this now:
Here is LinkedIn’s notice
And their helpful FAQ
Now I’m sure most of you already realise that anything you put on any platform over which you don’t have control, means, well, you don’t have control over that content.
So I would take this “opt out” selection as a polite request to the platform not to use your content to train their models. Clearly it’s not request to “opt out” from any other use to which they might put your data.
It all comes down to “trust”. While I have my own personal ranking among the majors as to who I trust the least, it should go without saying there is a good reason for my quoting the word “trust”.
PS: for all my friends under the realm of Brussels, well done. At least there is a “rulebook” leaning in your favour.
PPS: for the rest of us we can but hope that the “Brussels Effect” is alive, well and globally pervasive. At least in respect to the (mis)use of personal data.