What does privacy really mean? The biggest rage on LinkedIn at the moment, and there are lots of them, is that LinkedIn and their parent company Microsoft are collecting data from users on LinkedIn to feed their Generative AI model using an assumptive permission model.
What does that mean? It means that you need to go into your privacy settings to tell LinkedIn to stop collecting your personal data instead of them gaining your permission to do this before they go ahead.
Before I go any further, here are the steps to stop them from collecting your LinkedIn data.
- Go to your profile
- Click “Settings and Privacy”
- On the left menu click “Data Privacy”
- In the middle, click on “Data for Generative AI improvement”
- And click “Off”
Now, this will stop LinkedIn from collecting your data from this point forward. However, they have already scraped every piece of data you have input since joining LinkedIn and fed it into their Generative AI Dbase.
Now, before you get up in arms and wail against the big bad company, realise two things.
#1 You are playing in their sandbox and, therefore by their rules
#2 They are not the only ones out there scraping that same data
Privacy, in the true sense of the word as defined by the International Association of Privacy Professionals, is, “the right to be let alone, or freedom from interference or intrusion”
That is a wonderful definition if we were not interconnected as thousands of data points on the web. In addition, we waive our rights to privacy whenever we give permission to any app or piece of software we interact with, and most of us don’t even realise this because we never read the terms and conditions before we accept.
We blindly scroll to the end of the terms, hit “OK,” load the software, and blissfully utilise it because it benefits us. However, in many cases, as part of those terms and conditions, the software company gathers data to benefit itself and, at times, resells it to benefit others.
But it is not just the software overlords who are to blame. When we apply for credit cards and use them, we give up total control of our privacy. When we become part of an association, we give up part of our privacy.
When we use rewards programmes with hotels, airlines, grocery stores, or casinos, we give up some of our privacy. Truly, the only way to be completely secure is not to engage with anyone or anything, and how realistic is that?
We live in a data-controlled world, where information is gathered, analysed, interpreted, and utilised to the benefit of those gathering it. Because humans want a more personalised experience, they also use that data to benefit us. It is self-serving for everyone.
Most companies use this information ethically and morally, and some do not. I am not trying to be a doomsday alarmist. I think that having my information available gives me far more than I lose because today’s systems are meant to aggregate.
My value lies not in the thousands of pages of information I have made available to anyone through my websites, social media, blogs and podcasts; that information is designed to spark ideas and give people ways to think differently about their own situations. I truly add value when people know, like and trust me enough to let me know their hopes, wants, fears, desires, goals and aspirations and allow me to work with them to enable them to go from where they are to where they desire to be.
Generative AI, unless you create very specific models, which most companies do not have the time, money, or expertise to do, cannot solve specific problems but rather gather answers based on the aggregate. It would tell you what most people might do, but not what you should do based on your specific situation.
It is a whole new world, becoming far more complex daily. We need to worry about what is next and how to solve those problems instead of worrying about how someone scraped data from ideas we had five years ago.
Editor’s footnote
Ben Baker is a Featured Columnist for The Maverick Paradox Magazine. You can read his articles by clicking here:
