Lawsuit On User Data Usage By LinkedIn For AI Model Canceled

LinkedIn has shown evidence that they don't use customers' private messages to train AI (photo: x @LinkedIn)

JAKARTA The class action lawsuit accusing LinkedIn, Microsoft's business social media platform, of violating the privacy of millions of Premium subscribers by sharing their personal messages to train artificial intelligence (AI) models has been canceled.

Plaintiff Alessandro De La Torre, on Thursday January 30 filed a notification of the withdrawal of the lawsuit without prejudice in federal court San Jose, California, just nine days after suing LinkedIn. The revocation came after LinkedIn declared that the lawsuit was baseless.

De La Torre accused LinkedIn of violating promises to only use customer data to improve its services. He claims that LinkedIn secretly shares user private messages with third parties involved in AI development.

In its lawsuit, De La Torre stated that LinkedIn disclosed this unlicensed data sharing when updating its privacy policy in September 2024. In addition, a new account setting that allows users to prevent data sharing is not said to apply to data that has been used previously in AI training.

"This late disclosure from LinkedIn makes consumers worried and confused about what data is used to train AI," said Eli Wade-Scott, managing partner at Edelson PC, the law firm representing De La Torre, via email on Friday, January 31.

"However, users can feel calmer because LinkedIn has shown evidence that they don't use customers' private messages to train AI," he added. "We appreciate LinkedIn team professionalism."

In a post on LinkedIn on Thursday, January 30, Sarah Wight, lawyer and vice president of LinkedIn, confirmed that the company never shared users' private messages for AI training. "We never did that," he said.