Lawsuit Alleges Microsoft Trained AI on Private LinkedIn Messages

A LinkedIn Premium subscriber has sued the Microsoft-owned networking platform, claiming that the site breached contractual promises by disclosing customers’ private messages to third parties to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. “Given LinkedIn’s professional social media network role,” the complaint alleges, “ these communications include incredibly sensitive and potentially life-altering information about employment, intellectual property, compensation, and other personal matters.”

Filed in California’s federal court on Alessandro De La Torre’s behalf, the lawsuit alleged that InMail messages were fed to neural networks based on LinkedIn’s disclosure last year. The class-action lawsuit also claimed that LinkedIn concealed critical facts and attempted to cover its tracks after violating users’ privacy rights.

Privacy Violation

“In Section 3.2 of the LinkedIn Subscription Agreement (LSA), LinkedIn promises not to disclose its Premium customers’ confidential information to third parties,” the complaint noted, alleging a violation of the United States Stored Communications Act, breach of contract, and unfair competition under California law. However, a LinkedIn spokesperson told BBC News that the claims have no merit.

“This setting controls the training of generative AI models used to create content,” the company said. “When this setting is on LinkedIn, its affiliates may use the personal data and content you create on LinkedIn for that purpose.”

LinkedIn exempted customers in Canada, the E.U., the E.E.A., the U.K., Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Mainland China from having their LinkedIn data used “to train content-generating AI models.” Customers in the United States, where there’s still no federal privacy law, were offered a setting, enabled by default, titled “Data for Generative AI Improvement.”

LinkedIn acknowledges that it uses personal data and creative content for AI training and will share that data with third parties for model training. But the lawsuit raises the question of whether LinkedIn has included the contents of private InMail messages available to paying customers in the personal data disclosed.

The Puzzle

However, the complaint did not state that the plaintiffs have evidence of the shared InMail contents. Rather, the legal filing appears to assume InMail messages were included in AI training data based on LinkedIn’s alleged attempts to cover its tracks through a series of unannounced policy language changes, as well as the company’s failure to declare that it never accessed InMail contents for training publicly. The plaintiff seeks $1,000 in damages and possibly more relief as compensation.

Microsoft is one of the biggest investors and developers in the AI space, but it’s not the only one—see the others on our list of the top AI companies to better understand who is defining this dynamic technology.
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