Welcome to November, the month when clocks turn, darkness falls, gutters clog, and men are told to stop shaving while deep-frying turkeys. (Instructions unclear.) Let me add another to-do to your list. Take a few minutes this weekend to stop AI crawlers from grabbing your personal data. It’s easy, it’s just a toggle, I’ve got steps below.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Why should I do this now?
Because LinkedIn is about to spray your personal data like fertilizer on an Iowa cornfield.
The career-focused social media giant recently announced that it’s going to ramp up the way it crawls all the data on its platform and share it with its parent company, Microsoft, and, well, pretty much any other paying client who wants it. This update starts on Monday, Nov. 3.
WTF is an AI crawler
Think of them as digital spiders operating at the 2/3 the speed of light. AI crawlers are bots programmed to seek out information on the internet and gather it into massive databases, which can then be sold or used by tech companies to train their AI models or sell ads specifically targeted to your tastes.
New Scientist recently reported that ChatGPT-User, a bot powering ChatGPT, is now responsible for 6% of all web traffic.
How to disable LinkedIn’s AI crawler
Call up your LinkedIn page, click on “Me” in the upper right toolbar. A drop-down menu should appear. Click on “Settings & Privacy.” In the left-hand margin menu, click “Data privacy.” Click “Data for Generative AI Improvement.” Toggle to Off. The toggle capsule should appear black-and-white.
Next: In the left-hand margin menu, click “Advertising data.” Scroll down to find “Share data with affiliates and partners.” Click that, and then toggle to Off.
That’s it. You’re good to go. This will not affect your ability to use LinkedIn. It will not, sadly, block the posts that shame you for your lazy-ass grindset. It only affects LinkedIn’s ability to monetize your personal data.
Now do the same for other platforms
Nearly every other app, platform, and program you use is now hoovering your extremely valuable data via AI crawlers. Even Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
A while back I created this Guide To Disabling AI Crawlers for the Transparency Coalition. I keep it updated regularly.
It contains instructions for blocking crawlers from Microsoft 365 products, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, X and Grok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Pinterest, and others.
Facebook and Instagram, as Meta products, do not allow American users to opt out of AI crawling—although users in the EU do have that option, thanks to the fact that the EU actually has data privacy protections written into law. In other words: Facebook could offer its American users a way to opt out. Jeff Zuckerberg just doesn’t want to give us that choice.
More reading on AI crawlers and data privacy
Stanford / Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI): How Do We Protect Our Personal Information?
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MEET THE HUMANIST
Bruce Barcott, founding editor of The AI Humanist, is a writer known for his award-winning work on environmental issues and drug policy for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Outside, Rolling Stone, and other publications.
A former Guggenheim Fellow in nonfiction, his books include The Measure of a Mountain, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, and Weed the People.
Bruce currently serves as Editorial Lead for the Transparency Coalition, a nonprofit group that advocates for safe and sensible AI policy. Opinions expressed in The AI Humanist are those of the author alone and do not reflect the position of the Transparency Coalition.
Portrait created with the use of Sora, OpenAI’s imaging tool.