You Have One Week To Opt Out Or Become Fodder For Linkedin Ai Training

If you thought living in Europe, Canada, or Hong Kong meant you were protected from having LinkedIn scrape your posts to train its AI, think again. You have a week to opt out before the Microsoft subsidiary assumes you’re fine with it.

LinkedIn announced changes to its data use terms several weeks ago, noting that as of November 3 it would start sucking up data from “members in the EU, EEA, Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong” to train AI models. While not mentioned by name in the notice, scrolling down the update page to the section on the UK indicates that previous exceptions which rendered Blighty safe from LinkedIn scraping are being eliminated too.

As for what’s up for harvesting, it’s pretty much everything on LinkedIn, the update noted – profile details and public posts are all fair game. LinkedIn did take pains to spell out in multiple places that private messages aren’t included in the data it’ll be extracting, and with good reason. The company was sued in early 2025 for allegedly using private messages for AI training and it doesn’t want a repeat of that mess, even if the plaintiff withdrew the suit shortly after filing.

The data use terms update also mentioned that LinkedIn would begin sharing scraped data with its affiliates, which as far as LinkedIn is concerned means “companies that are related by ownership.” In other words, Microsoft and its subsidiaries would start getting access to profile data for training AI models too.

“Starting November 3, 2025, we will share additional data about members … with our Affiliate Microsoft so that the Microsoft family of companies can show you more personalized and relevant ads,” LinkedIn explained. “This data may include your LinkedIn profile data, feed activity data, and ad engagement data.”

No thanks, LinkedIn

If you’re not a fan of having your profile data slurped to train AIs or advertise Microsoft products, there’s a few things you can do quickly and easily to opt out. For users in the UK, EU, EEA, Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong both of these opt outs will be new. For users in the rest of the world (including the US), your data has already been scraped by LinkedIn to train AI for some time – affiliate (i.e. Microsoft) advertising via this data is new, but the opt-out steps for both are the same regardless of where you connect to the social network.

Opting out is thankfully simple, with the toggle for AI training found under the Settings > Data Privacy category. Preferences for advertising are located in the Advertising Data category in Settings, with three particular items under the Off LinkedIn Data header affecting whether LinkedIn profile and post data can be shared with Microsoft for serving ads.

Ads off Linkedin, Data from others for ads, and Measure ad success all affect how your LinkedIn data is related to ads from Microsoft and others. The fourth option, Share data with affiliates and partners, should also be toggled off for added privacy. Note this won’t stop affiliates and partners from serving you ads, they simply won’t be personalized using LinkedIn data. There’s no stopping the conversion machine, but you can make it a bit less likely to leak your personal data if a third-party breach occurs.

As noted above, LinkedIn users in the UK, EU, EEA, Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong have seven days from publication of this story to make those changes before LinkedIn starts its scrapers. ®

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