LinkedIn Sued for Allegedly Using Subscriber Data to Train AI
LinkedIn was sued Tuesday after allegedly disclosing Premium customers' private messages to third parties without their permission so it could train generative AI models.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
The class-action complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California by plaintiff Alessandro De La Torre on behalf of himself and other Premium users. According to the complaint, LinkedIn's parent Microsoft “claims it disclosed its users’ data to third-party ‘affiliates’ within its corporate structure, and in a separate instance, more cryptically to ‘another provider,’” despite lacking consent. This raises privacy issues, the complaint said, in that customers’ data is embedded in AI systems without their permission, and the disclosed private messages could reappear in other Microsoft products.
“When it was publicly revealed that LinkedIn had unilaterally disclosed its users’ data for these purposes, there was swift and harsh public backlash,” the complaint said. “LinkedIn responded the same day by discreetly modifying one of its privacy policies to account for AI-related data sharing and stated that users could choose to 'opt out' of future disclosures for these purposes.”
The complaint also alleged that LinkedIn has not offered to delete the collected data from AI models, or retrain them to rid them of the reliance on disclosed information. Since the plaintiffs are Premium customers and pay membership subscriptions, “which include heightened privacy protections,” they allege their contracts were breached as well.