Not in the Brief, Episode 04
You are, in all likelihood, reading this on LinkedIn. Somewhere in your account settings sits a switch labelled "Data for Generative AI Improvement". For most members it is on. Almost none of them turned it on. This is the fourth episode of Not in the Brief, a series about the things software does that were never in the brief: the features that arrive switched on, the clauses that appear in an update, the defaults that assume your consent because you did not object to a notice you never saw. The aim is not outrage. It is awareness: what was added, how it works, and how you check and change it on your own account.
The Feature
The setting permits LinkedIn to use your data to train generative AI models. Two kinds of model, in fact: LinkedIn's own, and those of its affiliate, Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn and runs the Azure OpenAI service the platform draws on. The data in scope is your profile information and the content you post publicly: your posts, your articles, your comments. LinkedIn states that private messages are not used. That distinction matters, and it is worth stating plainly so the rest of this piece is not misread: this is about your public content, the part of LinkedIn you intended to be seen, becoming training material. It is not about your inbox.
