Let’s cut through the AI hype and talk about what’s really happening to your data.
You’re not a user anymore. You’re training material.
Every post you’ve ever written. Every photo you’ve uploaded. Every professional milestone you’ve shared on LinkedIn. All of it is being fed into AI models—and you probably never explicitly agreed to it.
The Consent Collapse Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s the brutal reality: platforms are increasingly defaulting to using your profiles, posts, and interactions to train AI models unless you find a hidden toggle buried in privacy settings. This isn’t consent. This is consent theater.
Real consent means:
- Clear, upfront disclosure
- Active opt-in (not opt-out after the fact)
- Understanding what you’re agreeing to
What you’re getting instead:
- Vague policy updates buried in emails
- Settings hidden three menus deep
- Changes that apply to decades of your content retroactively
Quick Reality Check: LinkedIn will train AI on EU/EEA, Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong users’ data by default from November 3, 2025, covering decades of profile, posts, and activity unless users opt out in settings or file an objection.
That’s not asking permission. That’s announcing what they’re already planning to do.
Why “Public” Doesn’t Mean “Permission”
The platforms want you to believe: “You posted it publicly, so it’s fair game.”
The law disagrees.
Cases like Clearview AI show that harvesting public data can still be unlawful if it bypasses consent, purpose limitation, and fairness, even if the data was accessible on the open web. European regulators emphasize that using public personal data for AI must still meet GDPR principles, with higher scrutiny when processing is large-scale, opaque, or impacts rights.
Translation: Just because you shared your vacation photos doesn’t mean a tech company can scrape them to train facial recognition systems.
The Point of No Return: Once It’s Trained, It’s Gone
Here’s where it gets worse.
Once your data is baked into an AI model, deletion becomes nearly impossible.
Regulators warn that once public data is embedded in models, users effectively lose control because removing or correcting it post-training is technically and legally fraught. Model training breaks linkability to the source individual, making data subject rights, access, deletion, rectification, hard to execute in practice.
Think of it like this: Your data isn’t stored in a database you can delete from. It’s now part of the model’s “brain”, scattered across millions of parameters. True deletion from an already trained model is technically difficult; authorities note that removing a single person’s influence may require retraining or emerging “machine unlearning” methods.
What Real-World Harm Looks Like
This isn’t theoretical. The damage is already happening:
Medical Privacy Breaches: Cases include medical photos used in AI datasets despite consent being limited to treatment, illustrating secondary use and reidentification risks.
Facial Recognition Misuse: Clearview AI built a massive face database scraped from the web and was fined for unlawful biometric processing.
Voice Cloning Fraud: Voice-cloning scams and deepfake phishing surged in 2025, with reports of sharp quarter-over-quarter increases and widespread financial losses. Cheap, fast cloning from seconds of audio has enabled executive impersonation and robocall manipulation.
Inference of Sensitive Attributes: AI systems can infer unshared attributes such as health, politics, or religion from routine social signals, enabling discriminatory targeting.
The Regulators Are Finally Waking Up
Regulators are done issuing warnings.
Italy’s data protection authority fined OpenAI and imposed corrective measures, while Ireland’s DPC has engaged Google, Meta, and X on training with personal data. The EDPB’s 2024 opinion clarifies when training falls under GDPR, how “legitimate interests” is constrained, and how anonymity must be validated against re-identification risks.
This matters because companies can no longer hide behind vague claims of “anonymization” or “legitimate interests.”
The Bottom Line
AI companies are playing a high-stakes game with your privacy.
They’re banking on:
- Your ignorance of the defaults
- Your fatigue with privacy settings
- Your inability to act before training happens
Don’t give them what they want.
Your data is being weaponized for profit. Your face is being indexed. Your voice can be cloned. Your professional history is training models you’ll never benefit from.
The window to object is closing fast.
Your 48-Hour Action Plan:
□ Check LinkedIn settings and opt out
□ Review ChatGPT data controls □ Audit your most-used platforms
□ File objection/erasure requests where applicable
□ Document everything
The market rewards those who move fast. Privacy protection is no different.
Your data. Your rights. Your move.