
Facebook has been hiring third-party contractors to review and transcribe audio clips of its users, consistent with a new report from Bloomberg Facebook claims it stopped using human staff to review audio clips “more than a week ago,” noting that the contractors were antecedently employed to examine whether anonymized conversations were being properly transcribed on the messenger app.
Since 2015, messenger has offered a feature to transcribe voice clips to
text, though it’s turned off by default.
Facebook claims solely those who opted in to the feature
had their audio clips reviewed by third-party contractors. However, consistent with its support page,
if even one person in your chat has consented to Facebook transcribing
the conversation, any
audio within the thread
would have been translated, no matter who sent it.
The findings are notably troubling given that nowhere in Facebook’s support
page or terms of service does it
indicate that humans would be reviewing the audio. “Voice to Text uses machine
learning. The more you use this feature, the more Voice to Text can assist you,” the support page reads.