Facebook no longer needs recommendations. We all know it collects our data. But according to a post by Bloomberg, the company pays hundreds of employees to transcribe audio snippets of your conversations on its services.
Employees asked by Bloomberg they say that they do not know from which service the audio was recorded or how it was obtained, but only that they had to record audio files. According to company employees, these clips sometimes included "vulgar content".
Facebook on the other hand told Bloomberg that it had stopped transcribing voicemails 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 were using Facebook's Messenger app to send their voice conversations, 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 support page for the feature mentions anywhere that Facebook could record 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 think that since the data were anonymous, there is no problem. The problem is that the companies did not initially inform the end users.
Secondly, we should emphasize the fact that user conversations were listened to 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 known that Facebook and others are making progress but at the back of the consumer. I guess it's time for a new one Privacy Policy που κάνει πιο σαφές το πότε θίγεται το privacy of a user.
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