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LinkedIn’s actions are especially egregious as Premium users pay the company for heightened privacy, the lawsuit claims.
A legal complaint has been filed against LinkedIn that alleges the professional networking platform unlawfully disclosed private messages from its Premium subscribers to third parties in order to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The plaintiff, a LinkedIn Premium user, filed the lawsuit in the Northern District Court of California earlier this week on behalf of himself and other paying users of the service, accusing the company of disclosing “incredibly sensitive and potentially life-altering information” regarding employment, compensation and other private communications to third-party “affiliates” within its owner Microsoft’s corporate structure without their permission.
Moreover, the lawsuit also claims that by using private discussions to train AI models, the company has “permanently embedded” customer data in its AI systems, exposing them to future unauthorised usage.
Last year, LinkedIn updated its terms of service confirming that it will use member data to train generative AI models. In its updated privacy policy, the company specified that for its AI training, it will use “privacy enhancing technologies to redact or remove personal data” from its training sets, and while it has an opt-out option for its users, this is turned off by default. Although, EU users remained unaffected by these changes.
However, the lawsuit states that LinkedIn initially “unilaterally” disclosed its user data for AI training in August 2024, “discreetly” introducing an opt-out option after only news reports surfaced in mid-September, prompting “harsh” public backlash, and added that the company did not offer to delete the allegedly non-consensually acquired user data from existing AI models.
The lawsuit claims that LinkedIn’s alleged actions are especially serious since Premium members pay fees for their subscriptions, which include heightened privacy protections, and requests the court to order LinkedIn to delete all AI models trained using Premium users’ private messages and pay $1,000 in damages per user affected by the company’s actions.
Responding to a media request, a LinkedIn spokesperson told SiliconRepublic.com that the lawsuit contains “false claims with no merit”.
Last October, the Irish Data Protection Commission, concluding a nearly six-year long investigation into LinkedIn, fined the company €310m after finding that LinkedIn’s data processing practices infringed on multiple articles of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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