LinkedIn and Data Privacy: How Much Are You Really Sharing?

LinkedIn, an excellent social media platform for displaying your professional experience, connecting with colleagues, and finding new engaging opportunities. But what kind of data do you give up when joining the platform? In recent years, social media privacy has become a growing issue in the world because of companies’ lack of transparency of not sharing just how much data they actually collect, data breaches, and too much targeted advertising. As consumers become increasingly aware of what they are sharing online, frameworks such as the GDPR & CCPA are crucial to protecting and educating consumers on what exactly they are giving up when joining social media.

When we take a deep dive into LinkedIn, they collect the usual sets of generic data such as name, email address, mobile phone number, general location, and password. Premium members will also have to provide a type of payment to maintain a subscription. After creating an account, users are encouraged to fill out their public profile as much as possible which includes information such as past education, work experience, skills, photos, cities as well as endorsements. LinkedIn’s justification and explanation for obtaining all of this data is to help the consumer stay connected as best as possible by showing potential colleagues, informing us about topics that we may feel passionate about as well as exploring new and neighboring careers that might sound interesting to us. The platform also has its own privacy page where users can toggle what part of their profile they want visible to the public as well as configure how LinkedIn can use their data. Options include: Deleting, Changing, Correcting, Objecting to, Limiting and restricting the use of data. Although there are all of these options that make it seem like consumers are in control, there is still no telling what the company does in the background.

Controversy Arises

At the beginning of 2025, LinkedIn was sued by its premium members because it disclosed their private messages to third parties without permission to train AI models. Some customers argued that LinkedIn had discreetly updated their privacy policy to say the data could be used for AI even though consumers who opt out after the announcement could not do anything about the data that was already used to train AI. This controversy is certainly concerning for consumers, but it is far from surprising as several social media companies try to discreetly update their privacy policies without consumers noticing. That in turn, makes it easy for them to use our data for whatever they wish. 

Although LinkedIn has gotten into recent controversy, the platform does follow GDPR and CCPA guidelines. Users are able to optout of many of the data pieces that they are in control of. However, as a business, it’s crucial to follow GDPR best practices such as being transparent, limiting data collection, securing data and honoring user requests. As LinkedIn continues to improve, it’s important to recognize that change is inevitable and to embrace a growth mindset when it comes to leveraging data and analytics to inform decisions. (Chapter 12, The Marketing Playbook by Sharon Lee Thony) Also, LinkedIn should readjust and try to maintain as much transparency as possible and allow users to control what kind of information they’d like to be available.