After Google, Apple and Amazon faced scrutiny over it, Facebook is the latest tech giant that has been paying third-party contractors to transcribe and listen to conversations on its Messenger app.
Bloomberg reported that the company has hired hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe some of its audio clips. The employees were not told where the audio was from or how it was obtained, Bloomberg reports.
Facebook has even confirmed and said it will no longer continue the practice, following scrutiny into other companies.
“Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago.”Facebook
On Wednesday, 14 August, the Irish Data Protection Commission, which takes the lead in overseeing Facebook in Europe, said it was examining the activity for possible violations of the EU’s strict privacy rules.
Since 2015, Facebook Messenger has offered a feature to transcribe voice clips to text, although it is turned off by default.
"Facebook reportedly said affected users had selected the option to have their voice chats transcribed in their Messenger settings, and added that the data associated with the recordings was anonymised before being listened to by contractors," the report said.
Apple, Google and Amazon recently suspended human review of user audio recordings after reports said the companies used third-party contractors to listen to users’ voice recordings.
While Apple suspended the programme that let its virtual assistant Siri listen to users' recordings for "quality control", Google stopped listening and transcribing Google Assistant recordings in Europe.
Belgian broadcaster VRT NWS reported last month that users' conversations with Google Home speakers were being recorded and audio clips were being sent to sub-contractors who then "transcribed the audio files for subsequent use in improving Google's speech recognition technology", thus, raising serious privacy concerns.
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