This is important: LinkedIn has quietly rolled out a significant change that may affect millions of users worldwide. Beginning November 3, 2025, the professional networking platform began using member profiles, posts, resumes, and public activity to train its AI models-and it’s turned on by default.
The Microsoft-owned company confirmed that members in the United Kingdom, European Union, European Economic Area, Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong, will have data included in this new AI training. So, unless you do something about it, your professional information is now being fed into the machine learning systems of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is leveraging a vast reservoir of professional data to improve its AI capabilities, from the history of your work and your skills to the posts you share and with whom you interact. This information will be used to further fine-tune AI-powered features such as job matching algorithms and writing suggestions.
Also particularly noteworthy is the timing: LinkedIn announced these plans all the way back in September 2025, giving users just over a month to respond before the changes went live. The company is entitled to do this under “legitimate interest” provisions of data protection law, but it’s an opt-out-by-default approach that has raised some eyebrows among privacy advocates.
How to Stop LinkedIn from Using Your Data to Train its AI?
According to its support page, LinkedIn is relying on legitimate interest to process users’ data to train its AI; however, it does make clear that members can opt out at any time via account settings, though you will have to take a manual action to do so.
The implications are profound: your carefully crafted professional profile, years of career history, and networking activity could all become training material for AI systems. For many professionals, this raises uncomfortable questions about data ownership and privacy.
The worst part is that opting out won’t apply retroactively to your account, meaning only data collected after November 3, 2025, will not be used by LinkedIn. Any data before that date remains in the AI training environment forever. This gives a very small window for users to safeguard their past data, a window that has pretty much already passed for many who were never told about such changes.
Fortunately, LinkedIn has provided a way to opt out, though it requires navigating through several layers of menus. Here’s what you do:
Head to your LinkedIn account settings and select the “Data privacy” section under “How LinkedIn uses your data.” Within that menu you’ll find a setting labeled “Data for Generative AI Improvement.” This is the toggle you want to switch off.
Alternatively, you can use LinkedIn’s direct link to access this setting more quickly, saving yourself the hassle of clicking through multiple menus.
Opting Out and Further Objections for Privacy-Conscious Users
The process of opting out is quite simple once you find it, but the fact that it’s buried deep in settings rather than being presented as an active choice has frustrated many users who value their privacy.
If you would like to extend your objection beyond this basic opt-out, LinkedIn provides a further option. The platform has prepared a Data Processing Objection form covering data used for training not only content-generating but also other machine learning models.
This may better suit users more concerned with how their professional information is being leveraged through all the various AI initiatives at LinkedIn.
One small mercy: LinkedIn has confirmed that users under 18 will be automatically excluded from AI training, offering some protection for the younger members of the site.
How to Stop LinkedIn from Using Your Profile for AI Training?
LinkedIn is not alone in this regard. It simply followed the trend that other major social media platforms laid down. Meta did something similar last year with Facebook and Instagram, starting AI training again after regulatory review. In fact, it looks like the entire tech industry has decided as a whole that user-generated content is fair game for training the next era of AI systems.
This places professionals in a very difficult position, who rely on the site for networking, job searching, and industry connections. For many, leaving the platform is not pragmatic, so an opt-out feature is the only realistic way to maintain some control over personal data.
The deadline was November 3, 2025, but that does not mean it is too late to act. While you can’t recover data already collected, you can prevent future information from being added into the AI training pipeline at LinkedIn.
Take some time today to update your privacy settings. Considering how much professional and personal information lives on LinkedIn, it’s worth taking the time to make sure you are comfortable with how that information is utilized.
