Facebook Paid Contractors To Transcribe Users' Audio Chats

'Facebook has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to
transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, Bloomberg
reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the work. From the
report:

The work has rattled the contract employees, who are not told where
the audio was recorded or how it was obtained -- only to transcribe
it, said the people, who requested anonymity for fear of losing their
jobs. They're hearing Facebook users' conversations, sometimes with
vulgar content, but do not know why Facebook needs them transcribed,
the people said. Facebook confirmed that it had been transcribing
users' audio and said it will no longer do so, following scrutiny into
other companies.

"Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than
a week ago," the company said Tuesday. The company said the users who
were affected chose the option in Facebook's Messenger app to have
their voice chats transcribed. The contractors were checking whether
Facebook's artificial intelligence correctly interpreted the messages,
which were anonymized. [...] The social networking giant, which just
completed a $5 billion settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade
Commission after a probe of its privacy practices, has long denied
that it collects audio from users to inform ads or help determine what
people see in their news feeds.'

-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/08/13/200217

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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