From my reading of the article, this is Linkedin (an American company) that has decided to collect data about Europeans - the EU is not involved. Linkedin has decided that making it opt-out is covered by "legitimate interests". So I guess the real issue here is that the rest of you just don't get the option - you are included anyway.
"Legitimate interest" is a very specific term in context of GDPR. Not a lawyer, but have been looking into it previously, and I doubt "we want to feed data to our AI so we can make more money" passes the Legitimate Interest Assesment (LIA) test.
Here's an example of a test that must pass (sorry, docx, but way better than a random explainer): https://ico.org.uk/media2/for-organisations/forms/2258435/gd...
Legitimate interest does NOT require consent, is murky, and thus often gets used to justify things that should not exist under GDPR but the most likely consequence is that the company gets to do it for 3+ years before being told "no, you can't do that anymore"...
That content could contain personal data (such as when including it in your post), but that's an exception rather than a norm. And if we'd be following exceptions, even crawling websites could be illegal under the GDPR.
The resulting models might be a terrible hybrid distillation of GPT5 and Claude with a strong preference for hustle culture & banal parables.
"Should you choose to inscribe the lexical designation 'DOMINATE' within the commentary section, I shall subsequently furnish you with my proprietary methodology for accumulating substantial financial wealth in the millions."
"Comment the word DOMINATE and I'll share my secret method for making millions of dollars."
"yo if u type DOMINATE in comments ill tell u how 2 get mad rich like millions n stuff fr fr no cap"
Let it burn.
Stop AI-ifying your platforms
Only the people with the right grindset that do a 4am ice face bath will survive.
“Legitimate interest” is being used here to skirt around the need for consent (I.e. explicit opt-in) specifically because they know users will not give consent (otherwise they could easily ask them). That is an immediate red flag when it comes to “balancing” the rights and needs of the user vs the data processors “legitimate interest”.
i.e. big fine incoming for LinkedIn.
Its a really stupid time to test the EU over something that cant have much net value to LinkedIn - the EU have effectively been doubling the internal threshold for maximum fines every couple of years - if they decide to make it an example case, then the fine could be almost 3bn EUR (although LinkedIns revenues aren't so high, so they will probably just get slapped with a cool 1bn).
I don't know if it's AI slop or people genuinely baring their souls and revealing corpo-BS pseudo-deep thoughts, with a drop of grifters pushing their BS "Uber but for nailcare on Blockchain" whitepapers, either way I don't see any value you could extract from it.
Short of 4chan it's hard to think of a worse dataset. Do you really want a model trained on corporate thought leader gibberish?
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