X vs LinkedIn

Posting gives X a worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, modify, publish, distribute, and display your content in any media. This is much broader than what is strictly needed just to host your posts.

X expressly says it can analyze your content and use it to improve services, including training machine learning and AI models. Users who post may therefore help train AI systems without additional payment.

X collects the contents of Direct Messages, along with recipients, timestamps, and metadata for encrypted messages. Users should not assume ordinary messaging on the service is private from the platform.

X can let other companies, organizations, or individuals use or redistribute your content, including syndication, broadcast, and publication on other media and services. That expands downstream use beyond the platform itself.

X states you will not be paid for its use of your content or for others' licensed uses. The terms treat your ability to use the service as sufficient compensation.

X says it may collect log information even if you do not have an account or are signed out, including pages visited, search terms, ads shown, and cookie identifiers. That means tracking can extend beyond active account use.

X may associate your account with browsers, devices, email addresses, phone numbers, and signed-out identifiers to infer identity. This can make it harder to stay compartmentalized across devices or sessions.

X collects information about your interactions with ads served on X and off X, including views, clicks, and video engagement. This supports ad profiling based on behavior across contexts.

X automatically collects approximate location and can collect precise location if you enable it. Location data can be sensitive, especially when combined with activity and ad profiles.

X says you still own the content you create and post. That is better than an ownership transfer, though it is paired with a very broad license back to X.

If you use features that limit distribution to a restricted community, X says it will respect that choice. This is a useful transparency point, though it does not undo the broad underlying license.

LinkedIn collects not just profile data, but usage, device, location, message metadata, partner data, employer/school data, and off-site interaction data. This creates a detailed profile of your professional activity and browsing-related behavior.

Your profile, activity, inferred traits, and tracking technologies may be used to target and measure ads both on LinkedIn and elsewhere. There are settings to limit some ad uses, but the advertising system is broad by default.

If LinkedIn causes harm, its direct liability is generally capped at the fees you paid or US$1,000, and it excludes many indirect damages. That can significantly limit practical remedies for account, data, or service problems.

Users can request deletion, correction, restriction, objection, access, and a machine-readable copy of their data. These are meaningful privacy controls, especially for users in stronger-rights jurisdictions.

LinkedIn states that closed-account data is generally deleted within 30 days and the profile usually becomes hidden within 24 hours. That is more concrete than many platforms’ vague retention language.

LinkedIn says it may use personal data to develop, improve, and train AI models and generate inferences about you. That can include activity and other service data beyond what users may expect from a networking platform.

You keep ownership of your posts, but LinkedIn gets a worldwide, transferable, sublicensable license to use, modify, distribute, and display them without compensation. Some copies or sublicensed uses may persist after deletion.

Paid subscriptions renew automatically unless you cancel before the renewal date. LinkedIn may also continue billing stored payment methods and fall back to secondary payment methods if provided.

The supplied terms point disputes to courts rather than mandatory arbitration. EU/EEA/Swiss users also keep local consumer protections, which is more favorable than many large tech platforms’ dispute clauses.

LinkedIn can change its terms and privacy policy, and continued use counts as acceptance. It promises no retroactive changes and usually gives notice of material changes, which softens the risk somewhat.

Even after account closure, some content may remain visible to others, search caches may persist, and LinkedIn may retain data for legal, security, fraud, or de-identified uses. Users should not assume total erasure of everything they shared.

LinkedIn says it does not share personal data with non-affiliated advertisers except in limited cases such as hashed identifiers, user permission, or already-public profile data. This is better than an outright statement of selling full personal data to advertisers.