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Facebook Paid Contractors to Transcribe Users’ Audio Chats

36 points by Vaslo 7y ago

giancarlostoro 7y ago
Once your content leaves your device (and in some cases once it enters your device, or even once your device is on) there is no guarantee of any privacy. Someone somewhere may eventually see your content, even accidental pictures that would be inappropriate for anybody to see, that you'd delete after, but oh whoops it's already backed up to the cloud. Sad how many wont even realize the implications of any of these services.
sverige 7y ago
> Facebook first started allowing Messenger users to have their audio transcribed in 2015. “We’re always working on ways to make Messenger more useful,” David Marcus, the executive in charge of the service at the time, said in a Facebook post. Wait, they "allowed" users to have their audio transcribed? Was this as a service, or is it just the b.s. corporate speak that FB always uses to hide what they're actually doing?
- dekhn 7y ago
  it's opt-in with informed consent.
akuji1993 7y ago
And again, it was clearly pointed out, that users opted into this with clear consent. There is no real story here, as this is exactly what was agreed to by both parties.
- wang_li 7y ago
  Opting into transcription is not the same thing as Facebook recording your conversation and storing it for later training data, human verification of the transcription, etc. Nor does it give Facebook the right to record audio when people are in two-party consent states without permission from all parties.
flavor8 7y ago
I'm no fan of Facebook's privacy track record, but this seems like a pretty alarmist story. Accurate transcription is hard. You need hundreds or thousands of hours of training data to get to WERs that consumers will accept on a single accent in a single language. Then you need to do the same for major accent variations (Irish & Indian english, for example). Then you need to do the same again for other languages. You also need to account for big variations in microphone hardware, perhaps bandwidth (which might affect bitrate of the captured audio), and so on and so forth. Facebook could theoretically have paid voice actors to produce the training data up front to eliminate concerns, and then never tweaked their models based on user data, but the results certainly wouldn't have been as good. That all said, if they buried the opt-in, they deserve flak.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
everdrive 7y ago
>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 This sort of accusation could be overblown or underblown. Do we actually know the source of these recordings? Whose audio was recorded, under what conditions?

36 points by Vaslo 7y ago

Once your content leaves your device (and in some cases once it enters your device, or even once your device is on) there is no guarantee of any privacy. Someone somewhere may eventually see your content, even accidental pictures that would be inappropriate for anybody to see, that you'd delete after, but oh whoops it's already backed up to the cloud. Sad how many wont even realize the implications of any of these services.

sverige 7y ago

> Facebook first started allowing Messenger users to have their audio transcribed in 2015. “We’re always working on ways to make Messenger more useful,” David Marcus, the executive in charge of the service at the time, said in a Facebook post. Wait, they "allowed" users to have their audio transcribed? Was this as a service, or is it just the b.s. corporate speak that FB always uses to hide what they're actually doing?

dekhn 7y ago
it's opt-in with informed consent.

akuji1993 7y ago

And again, it was clearly pointed out, that users opted into this with clear consent. There is no real story here, as this is exactly what was agreed to by both parties.

wang_li 7y ago
Opting into transcription is not the same thing as Facebook recording your conversation and storing it for later training data, human verification of the transcription, etc. Nor does it give Facebook the right to record audio when people are in two-party consent states without permission from all parties.

flavor8 7y ago

I'm no fan of Facebook's privacy track record, but this seems like a pretty alarmist story. Accurate transcription is hard. You need hundreds or thousands of hours of training data to get to WERs that consumers will accept on a single accent in a single language. Then you need to do the same for major accent variations (Irish & Indian english, for example). Then you need to do the same again for other languages. You also need to account for big variations in microphone hardware, perhaps bandwidth (which might affect bitrate of the captured audio), and so on and so forth. Facebook could theoretically have paid voice actors to produce the training data up front to eliminate concerns, and then never tweaked their models based on user data, but the results certainly wouldn't have been as good. That all said, if they buried the opt-in, they deserve flak.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

everdrive 7y ago

>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 This sort of accusation could be overblown or underblown. Do we actually know the source of these recordings? Whose audio was recorded, under what conditions?