Facebook has allowed its employees to listen to and transcribe some conversations of users of its Messenger messaging app. According to statements made by the company to Bloomberg , those who had activated the transcription function for voice conversations would have been affected . the software had correctly understood the spoken sentences. The conversations had been anonymized, and this practice stopped more than a week ago.
In recent weeks, Amazon, Apple and Google have also come under fire for allowing australia phone number their employees to analyze recordings of language assistant software without users' knowledge.
For Facebook, the situation is even more complicated: for years there have been rumours that the social network's apps listen to users in order to personalise advertising. Cases where ads coincide with a previous conversation are pointed out as evidence of this. Facebook has always rejected this accusation, and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressly denied it in a hearing in the US Congress, referring to a "conspiracy theory".
Facebook had also stated that the network processes audio data only if a user has given permission. While it is clear that recordings need to be processed for a transcription function, users may not be aware that in some cases other people are also listening to them.
As far as permissions are concerned, companies are given a blank check by users to use data to improve the service. The fact that voice recordings could not only be analysed by software, but could also be listened to by people, is not explicitly mentioned.
At Apple, there was at least some indication of the possibility of such transcriptions by its language assistant Siri in a security document for developers. However, the text was difficult to find for a common user.
Apple has stopped analyzing recordings and promised to ask for explicit permission in the future. Google also stopped the practice in early July. Amazon, for its part, has recently offered users the option to prevent recording analysis.
Facebook had “hundreds” of employees at third-party service providers listening to the audio clips, Bloomberg reports, citing people briefed. What is unknown is under what circumstances the conversations were recorded and for what purpose they were transcribed , the outlet