Facebook now and then gets involved in issues related to privacy. Facebook has been accused several times of misusing and its user’s data and invading their privacy. The latest entry to this is the company listening to the voice chats of its users on FB that too without their permission.
According to Bloomberg, Facebook has hired paid contractors to transcribe the audio chats of its users’, especially on the Facebook Messenger platform. There were also many voice conversations which were vulgar in nature. This shows that the company has accessed a lot of highly sensitive data.
The people who are aware of this fact and own a little information about this suggests that the contractors who were given the task to transcribe the audio chats were not allowed to know that purpose of the task.
TaskUs Inc was one of the hired contractors who were allotted to complete the task. The company said that they were unaware of the whereabouts of the voice clips. Facebook never told the hired contractors anything related to the purpose of the job. This forced the TaskUs’s employees to think that they were doing something which is illegal or unethical.
What Facebook has to say about this?
The company has admitted that they have hired several paid contractors to transcribe the user’s voice clips and the main aim for doing this was to find out that its AI program can understand the messages correctly or not.
However, the sources say that the company have stopped doing this a week before, but after knowing that various other companies have also been caught listening to users audio conversations.
Facebook did all these without the permission of its users. The Facebook data-use policy reads that the company can collect users data, but we did not find anything specifically related to the voice clips.
Recently, we did see that Apple’s Siri was also accused of doing the same activity and their aim behind doing this was also the same.
