Even if you haven’t knowingly opted in, companies are still scraping your personal information to train their systems Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. If you’d like to skip to a section about a particular site or social network, click the “Jump to” menu at the top of this article. The competition to make the latest, greatest, most advanced artificial intelligence thing has turned an already data-hungry tech industry ravenous. Companies looking to build out their AI-powered search engines, smart email composers or chatbots are scraping your posts and personal data and using them to train those systems, which need ever-increasing amounts of text and images. Continue reading...

The networking site one is calling a ‘cesspool’ is riddled with oversharing and lunatics – it’s time for change In need of a laugh? Spend an hour or two on the subreddit LinkedInLunatics. Trust me. There’s the financial expert who believes it necessary to share with his friends, clients and community that he enjoys watching porn (in moderation, mind you!). There’s the usual crowd of pundits who use cultural events like the Olympics competitions to teach us life lessons. Or the matchmaking company that thinks LinkedIn is Hinge. Continue reading...

CEO Sarah Franklin got such intense pushback on her company’s plans that she suspended them after three days One thing seems for sure: people are not ready for “digital workers” just yet. That’s the lesson learned by Sarah Franklin, the CEO of Lattice, a human resources and performance management platform that offers performance coaching, talent reviews, onboarding automation, compensation management and a host of other HR tools to more than 5,000 organizations around the world. Continue reading...