Facebook no longer needs recommendations. We all know that it collects our data. But according to a Bloomberg publication, the company pays hundreds of employees to transcribe audio excerpts from your conversations to its services.
Employees asked by Bloomberg they say that they do not know from which service the sound was recorded or how it was obtained, but only that they had to record audio archives. According to company employees, these clips sometimes included "vulgar content".
Facebook, on the other hand, told Bloomberg 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 the conversations used were anonymous.
The clips came from users who used Facebook's Messenger app to send their voicemails, according to the publication.
So the company's employees (if we believe the statements of Facebook) probably tried 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 of the feature's support pages mention anywhere that Facebook could transcribe these conversations. Although the support page notes that the feature uses machine learning, the average user would not expect their messages to be heard by third parties (real people).
But Facebook is not the only company listening to its users' voice clips. Amazon, Apple and Google have done exactly the same to improve the voice assistants they use. Facebook says it stopped listening to voicemail from Messenger when Apple and Google stopped.
Of course, you may be thinking that since the data was anonymous, it doesn't exist problem. So the problem is that the Companies they didn't inform the end users in the first place.
Secondly, we should emphasize the fact that user conversations were heard by real people, and there is a big difference between a computer listening to a conversation and a real person.
In addition, according to one Publication of The Guardian in late July, Apple officials who analyzed Siri conversations often met "drug deals, medical details and people who had sex“. These recordings “were accompanied by user data showing the location, providing contact information, and data from device applications".
Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it intends to encrypt all conversations across all of its services. So before he made the big decision, he probably thought he'd get a little more as far as he could.
When Facebook changed its data usage policy last year to make it more understandable, it made no direct reference to how it uses the recordings. It only states that it collects "content, communications, and other information you provide”When using the company's applications. 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 is 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 compromised.
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