There is a new, big social scandal on the horizon. Second a report released by Bloomberg, Facebook allegedly paid “hundreds” of contractors to transcribe our audio messages from our conversations.
All this without making it clear enough how these audio clips of our conversations would be recorded.
Facebook employees interviewed by Bloomberg (with the guarantee of anonymity) confirmed that they did not know exactly where this audio was recorded, by which of Facebook's apps, or how it was obtained. The Menlo Park Society confirmed to Bloomberg that it stopped these audio transcriptions “over a week ago,” following a trend pioneered by Google and Apple.
Facebook confirmed that the contractors have verified the performance of the AI transcription tools. The audio clips would come from users who "have chosen to have their chats transcribed in Facebook Messenger".
This is presumably the "voice to text" option that can be enabled after sending a voice clip with Messenger, a feature introduced in 2015.
In none of the associated pages is there any indication that Facebook verified the transcription of the conversations "by hand" with human beings.
The support pages mention machine learning, not real people listening to what we say in chats and taking notes. The difference is huge and disturbing.
In a few weeks the major messengers in the world (Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook) have revealed that they listen to what we say by individuals. It's not a good sign for privacy and paves the way for several lawsuits.
Be quiet, the enemy listens to you
In a report published by the English newspaper The Guardian at the end of July, people paid by Apple to listen to our requests to Siri reported having come across "drug purchases, medical details and people having sex". These indications arrive accompanied by details of the place, contact details and more.
Guys, this is very serious. It is more and worse than any totalitarian regime in history. It is time for the giants of the web to make cases where a user's privacy is compromised a priori and absolutely transparent.
