A case that came directly after it was made official on LinkedIn that I will be one of the speakers of the VIenna AI Engineering meetup. A US-company that made ca. 37 billion profit in 2025 contacts me in a private Email. The person claims they saw my profile on Linkedin (blatant lie, I have LinkedIn Premium and I can confirm he did not before writing this EMail) and wanted to talk with me about AI-related issues (which is fine). They, of course, did not see my personal statement IN the LinkedIn profile THEY CLAIM they found me, and also disrespected it completely; if they found me through that, then the fastest way would be to message me. Needless to say, they want to collaborate with me and never saw my personal web page. Although the company is based in the US, the person is of Austrian heritage .
I kindly proposed to this person to meet at the Meetup, where we would have much more time to talk, so if they really wanted to talk to me, what better place, right?
… let’s ask where they have my personal data…
btw. the LinkedIn profile contains my old tugraz EMail address
Since there was no answer, I sent another EMail the next day.
A 37 billion profit-making US company that is related to AI and wants to talk about it admits that they don’t know where or how they have my personal data.
Read that again. They have more than 70.000 employees over the world. It’s 2026, and the application of GDPR is 8 years old; the EU AI Act is already defined, with so many training courses online.
After I informed the Austrian Data Protection Authority, they had a glimpse of where they’ve got the data. But they still don’t say why they’ve stored it and who was responsible. They deleted it (supposedly) without my request, and they don’t want to contact me again, now that I am posing the real questions. Now you remembered to respect my rights and my needs – too late
Good luck to the company, btw. does not reply to me anymore. #professional_ghosting
