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LinkedIn allegedly shared private messages of Premium users for training AI models

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LinkedIn, the professional networking platform owned by Microsoft, is facing a class-action lawsuit from some of its own Premium members. These users claim that LinkedIn shared their private messages and other data with third-party companies to help train artificial intelligence (AI) models, all without asking for their permission. The lawsuit was filed in a court in San Jose, California, and it represents millions of LinkedIn Premium subscribers.

It all started when LinkedIn made changes to its privacy policies in 2024. In August, the company introduced a new setting that allowed users to control whether their data could be shared but just a month later, in September, LinkedIn updated its policy again. This time, it said that user data could be used to train AI systems, even if users chose not to share their data going forward. The policy also mentioned that any data already used for AI training couldn’t be removed or undone. This upset many users, who felt they weren’t properly informed about how their data was being used.

The lawsuit claims that LinkedIn violated the trust of its Premium users by sharing their private information without permission. The users are asking for financial compensation ($1,000 per person) and want LinkedIn to be held accountable for what they see as unfair practices, according to the lawsuit.

LinkedIn said in a statement to Reuters, "These are false claims with no merit."

Scraping data from the internet to train gen-AI models isn't new and AI companies have faced scrutiny over this, including lawsuits. A recent court filing revealed Mark Zuckerberg had approved the use of LibGen, a dataset of pirated ebooks and articles to train its Llama AI models. Last year, major newspaper companies also sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using their data for training AI models without permission.

Source: Reuters

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