What is it with American big tech and blatant disregard for EU privacy laws.
“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.
But will the "big fine" be more than the money LinkedIn will make by doing this?
I'm not sure how they are going to make money from this. LinkedIn has to be one of the most worthless dataset in existence for training an AI, half of it already looks generated by a LLM itself and the rest is low value content.
Even if it was free I wouldn't include it in AI training.
I would like to think this will go towards the upper bounds (up to 4% of global revenue), as they are doing so wilfully and to a large number of users. This is exactly the showcase the EU needs to make an example of how not to abuse the legitimate interest exceptions.
Its a really stupid time to test the EU over something that cant have much net value to LinkedIn - a 1bn EUR fine (approx 4% of LinkedIns revenue) is well within the current internal "cap" the EU have reached with issuance of fines.
But who knows. The EU is much more patient than I, and prefers boiling frogs to scalding them.