Find out what happened, what you can do to protect your privacy, and why big tech companies are paying people to listen to you
Facebook controversies come and go, but a recent issue involving the surveillance and transcription of users’ conversations seems particularly troubling to government officials, privacy watchdogs, and users. Here are answers to 10 questions you may have about the issue. What is the controversy?
Facebook paid contractors to listen to and transcribe audio clips from users who chose to have their voice chats transcribed by AI in its Messenger app, Bloomberg reported. In seeking user approval, the company only presented transcription as a feature for users to have text of their spoken messages, and failed to mention that human transcribers would listen to their messages, Bloomberg reported. Contractors who transcribed the recordings for Facebook told the news service they had no knowledge of where the audio was being recorded or how it was obtained, and had ethical concerns about the assignment. Facebook says the contractors were checking whether the social media company’s artificial intelligence correctly interpreted the messages, which were anonymized. The company told the CNET tech news service it stopped the practice, saying “we paused human review of audio.”
Why are humans at big tech companies listening to us?
Voice assistants need human guidance to accurately understand what we tell them. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have all paid workers to listen to their users’ conversations. As The Atlantic writes: “This is ..
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