LinkedIn has stopped training its artificial intelligence models on the data of UK users after it received a complaint from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the regulator in charge of enforcing UK data privacy laws. The complaint was raised with the Microsoft-owned company after users were quietly opted in to have their data train AI models.
Providing comment for the ICO, its executive director, Stephen Almond, said:
"We are pleased that LinkedIn has reflected on the concerns we raised about its approach to training generative AI models with information relating to its UK users."
A spokesperson for LinkedIn also commented, saying:
"We’ve always used some form of automation in LinkedIn products, and we’ve always been clear that users have the choice about how their data is used. The reality of where we're at today is a lot of people are looking for help to get that first draft of that resume... to help craft messages to recruiters to get that next career opportunity. At the end of the day, people want that edge in their careers and what our gen-AI services do is help give them that assist."
The data used to train AI models has been a big talking point in recent years, with companies like Reddit charging very large amounts of money to access its content for AI training purposes. As the biggest professional social network, LinkedIn certainly hosts very valuable data for training models on, but in the case of the UK users, it will now not be able to use their data.
According to BBC News, people in the European Union, European Economic Area, and Switzerland are also protected from having their data used to train models.
The whole issue of training data is a contentious one. For example, free AI models like GPT-4o mini and Gemini are very helpful to many people, helping them work more productively or as conversational tools.
For free users who are not paying anything, then giving up your data for training purposes seems very fair. However, these companies don't stop there, they also have subscription models that cost a fair bit of money, and users are not compensated in any way for providing their data which is a bit questionable.
Source: BBC News
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