Folk have been wrapping things up for year end (no pun intended) & I’ve seen a flurry of content across LinkedIn where people use AI to summarise their LinkedIn 2024 activity.
Time’s a precious thing & labour saving tools for the win, right?
Ever the curious soul that I am, I donned some of my several hats (being a consultant often demands it) & conducted some digital sleuthing.
The hats in particular I wore were that of contracts analyst (hey, I’ve read through & signed a few in my time) with a focus on privacy champion.
Here goes…
‘Coauthor‘ claims it is:
“… a new service that helps busy professionals transform ideas into influential content in their own voice”.
Built with ‘Hunch‘ (which appears to be a platform using aggregated AI tools, or at least the data from them) its Terms of Use Agreement & Privacy Policy are those of a company based in the United States of America called Neon Data, Inc.
So far so good & hardly anything out of the ordinary. Let’s dig a bit deeper into these documents… you *did* read through them, didn’t you?
Leaving aside the questionable formatting of the TOA documents preamble (“Error! Reference source not found”) a few parts stood out to me that give me pause for thought.
Due to character limits I’ve screen grabbed them as of todays date & included them below. I’ve also highlighted the text that gave me pause for thought.
Now such things of course need to be considered in their full context. I’m not going to cite the whole text of them here… not when I can provide you their links that is:
Neon Data, Inc. ,Terms of Use Agreement, Last Updated Date: December 5th 2023: https://static.hunch.tools/terms.pdf
Neon Data, Inc. , Privacy Policy, Effective as of December 5th, 2023: https://static.hunch.tools/privacy.pdf
If I’m right then not only are you potentially letting this company access, copy & monetise / use all of your own LinkedIn account data, files, images etc but also the content of anyone who has perhaps slid into your direct messages.
I don’t mean their LinkedIn account data & content, but any which they may have passed on to yours. You know, things like:
– Discussions about contractual, business or other agreements
– Links to data sets or other financial information
– Images, files or details about colleagues, friends & family members
If you and any of the involved stakeholders are happy with such things then you’ve nothing to worry about, right? Totally within all relevant IT acceptable use, privacy & information security policies, yes? 🤔
Additionally I may be entirely wrong in my interpretation of things. After all, I am only human.
If you’d like me to summarise my year then it’ll have to be in person, I’m afraid. Lets meet up and have a one-to-one over tea, coffee or perhaps a hot chocolate.
