Facebook needs no introduction. We all know that it collects our data. But according to a Bloomberg report, the company pays hundreds of employees to transcribe audio clips of your conversations on its services.
Employees interviewed by Bloomberg say they don’t know which agency the audio was recorded by or how it was obtained, only that they were required to transcribe audio files. According to the company employees, these clips sometimes included “vulgar content.”
Facebook, on the other hand, told Bloomberg that it had stopped transcribing audio messages a week ago, following Apple and Google.
The social network said that employees were simply verifying the performance of the company's tools and AI, and that all conversations used were anonymous.
The clips came from users who used Facebook's Messenger app to send their voice conversations, according to the publication.
So the company's employees (if we believe Facebook's statements) were probably testing the "voice to text" option that you can activate after sending a voice clip to Messenger, a feature that was first released in 2015.
But neither the Messenger app nor any support page for the feature mentions that Facebook could transcribe these conversations. Although the support page notes that the feature uses machine learning, the average user wouldn't expect their messages to be heard by third parties (real people).
But Facebook isn't the only company listening to its users' voice clips. Amazon, Apple, and Google have all done the same to improve their voice assistants. Facebook says it stopped listening to Messenger voice messages when Apple and Google stopped.
Of course, you might think that since the data was anonymous, there is no problem. The problem is that the companies did not inform the end users in the first place.
Secondly, we should emphasize the fact that the users' conversations were listened to by real people, and there is a big difference between a computer listening to a conversation and a real person.
Furthermore, according to a report by The Guardian in late July, Apple employees analyzing Siri conversations often encountered “drug deals, medical details, and people having sex.” These recordings were “accompanied by user data showing location, contact information, and data from the device’s apps.”
Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it plans to encrypt all conversations across its services. So before making the big decision, it probably thought it would eavesdrop a little longer while it could.
When Facebook changed its data usage policy last year to make it more understandable, it didn’t make any direct mention of how it uses the recordings. It only says that it collects “content, communications, and other information you provide” when using the company’s apps. But most of us know that AI models are trained and supervised by real people, although no one knows when or how extensively they use our data.
So it's well known that Facebook and others are making progress but at the expense of the consumer. It's probably time for a new privacy policy that makes it clearer when a user's privacy is being compromised.
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