LinkedIn’s Latest Privacy Plot Twist
Did you know your next résumé update could end up training Microsoft’s AI, without you ever saying yes?
Starting November 3, 2025, LinkedIn will automatically funnel your posts, resumes, skills, and even profile updates into Microsoft’s AI pipeline. Your career story becomes fresh training fuel, and, bonus, more ammo for Microsoft’s ad machine.
The kicker: you’re enrolled by default. Unless you dig into the settings and toggle it off, LinkedIn assumes you’re fine with all of this.
What Data LinkedIn Is Feeding to AI
Here’s the short version of what’s changing:
AI Training: LinkedIn will use your posts, comments, profile details, resumes, and skills to train its content-generating AI. (They swear private messages are excluded, for now.)
Microsoft Ad Sharing: More of your LinkedIn activity will flow into Microsoft’s ad network. Even if you opt out of ad personalization, you’ll still see ads, just slightly less creepy.
Opt-Out Only: The switch is buried in your privacy settings. Default = ON.
Why This Puts Your Career at Risk
This isn’t just about creepier ads. There are real risks when your professional life becomes raw material for AI:
Hiring bias: AI recruitment tools have a history of reinforcing prejudice, Amazon scrapped its own system after it discriminated against women’s resumes. If LinkedIn trains on biased data, those patterns creep into job recommendations.
Data leakage: AI models sometimes regurgitate unusual or unique training examples (Carlini et al., 2021). That quirky line in your resume could, in rare cases, surface in someone else’s AI output.
Loss of control: Opting out only prevents future use. LinkedIn openly admits data already ingested stays in the training sets. Once it’s in, it’s in.
Why LinkedIn Made Opt-Out the Default
Let’s be real: LinkedIn didn’t design this default for your convenience. They did it because:
Scale matters: AI models need mountains of data. An opt-in would starve the pipeline. Opt-out ensures a constant stream.
Money talks: Microsoft’s building its Copilot empire, and LinkedIn’s professional graph is a goldmine.
Friction kills adoption: Most people won’t bother digging through menus. Default enrollment = maximum supply with minimum fuss.
It’s a classic dark pattern: bury the fire exit behind a curtain and bet you won’t look for it.
3 Steps to Opt Out Now
Don’t wait until November. Here’s how to shut it down:
Go to: Settings & privacy → Data privacy → Data for Generative AI Improvement.
Toggle it off to stop LinkedIn from using your future data for AI training.
Review ad personalization to limit how much Microsoft exploits your LinkedIn activity.
Heads up: This does not remove any data already used for training. It only stops new contributions.
Extra credit: If you’re in the EU or other regulated regions, you can file a Data Processing Objection, basically a legal request to limit how your data is used.
Final Thoughts: Your Career, Their AI
LinkedIn is banking on you shrugging this off. But think about it: your resume, your posts, your endorsements, these weren’t meant to be raw material for Microsoft’s Copilot.
You wouldn’t hand your résumé to a random recruiter on the street. So why hand it to an algorithm by default?
Take back control:
Opt out today.
Prune sensitive old posts and resumes.
Check your LinkedIn privacy settings regularly.
👉 Your move: Will you let LinkedIn’s AI train on your career, or lock it out before November 3?
Opt out now, and tell your network. The more people push back, the harder it is for LinkedIn to ignore.