Facebook has confirmed the sending of private audio messages to third companies without communicating it to users. They were trying to transcribe to text and have momentarily stopped this practice as others have already done.
We continue with more companies that sent audios to third companies for evaluation, and as usual they were sent without the knowledge or express permission of the users, something that can violate many data protection laws. This time Facebook wanted to transcribe audios to text to improve the subtitles of their videos, and for this they hired external companies with employees in not very good conditions.
In this case, Facebook provided audio companies with private conversations without notifying the user. Once sent to one of the hundreds of partner companies, they dedicated themselves to converting it to text to compare with automated systems to improve quality. This means that some people had to pass private data to text very carefully, sometimes with very long hours and with just breaks.
More private conversations being sent to third parties
Facebook itself has admitted that they did but that they have already stopped these practices, ensuring that it was the users themselves who approved of entering the program. But as we know with Facebook this is not necessarily true and in a statement in the United States Congress they categorically denied doing these practices.
We don't trust Facebook a lot, and we have reasons for it despite the fact that we continue to use it every day. But it is also not an isolated problem, since absolutely all companies that use voice recognition do similar practices to improve their services and in very few places they detail how it is done. This is just one more of the situations in which large technology companies use the private information of users in an unresponsible way and we will surely find many more cases like this before the first fines are issued.
Source PhoneArena
