FACEBOOK – Users’ Conversations Are Being Listened And Transcribed
FACEBOOK – Facebook was reported to have paid several contractors to listen and transcribe parts of users’ conversations.
According to Manila Bulletin, the company behind the social media platform confirmed the reported transcriptions, saying that they did these with permission from the users but it has been halted.
The company also noted that Google and Apple also did these transcriptions but much like them, they also halted these more than a week ago.
The paid contractors were testing FB artifical intelligence’s ability to interpret messages. The only affected users were those on the Messenger app, who agreed to have their voice chats transcribed.
The contractors who worked on the transcription were reportedly rattled by listening to private audio which sometimes has vulgar content. Their origins were not revealed. The said contractors were not informed as to why they were paid to transcribe.
As per the report, Amazon, Apple and Google also confirmed that they were also collecting conversations for the reason that thy want to improve their products. Apple and Google also confirmed that they paused the transcription, but Amazon gave users the choice to block the collection of their voice via Alexa.
The company, which previously settled the $5 billion fine with the US Federal Trade Commission for their case of misusing private data of users, gave differing replies to reports regarding the use of voice data to target ads or to improve pages.
The company CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in a US Senate last year, pointing out that they talked about conspiracy theory that the social media platform listen to the conversation and use that data for ads, in which he denied the claim.
The company, however, confirmed that they did that if the user allows it but they did not gave a clear reason why.
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