Beware! Facebook Might Be Listening To Your Messenger Audio Conversations

Facebook is once again making news for all the wrong reasons. This time around, the social networking giant is under fire for allowing human contractors to listen to audio recordings carried out on one-of-the widely used platform owned by Facebook. As per a report by Bloomberg.com, Facebook hired outside people to listen to audio conversations carried out on Facebook Messenger.

The report further mentions that the contract employees were not even told where the audio was recorded or how the Facebook obtained it. The hired employees were essentially listening and transcribing random audio conversations from Facebook users.

Facebook is not shying away from accepting the fact that it paid third-party sources to transcribe users' audio conversations. However the company confirmed to stop doing it in future and mentioned that the audio conversations given to contract employees were anonymized to ensure user's privacy.

The transcribing of audio conversations was carried out to test Facebook's artificial intelligence ability to interpret the messages. Other big fishes like Apple, Google and Amazon were also reported to perform the same exercise of collecting user's voice samples to feed their AI assistants for better user response.

Microsoft is the most recent addition to the list. The tech giant came under radar when Vice News reported that the company let human contractors analyze user's voice samples over Cortana and Skype to improve the software's performance.

This raises a big question on the use of AI assistants and apps owned by leading technology companies in our daily routines. It is a common practice to feed data to AI softwares to improve their ability to understand and response to user commands. However, the human intervention to transcribe the data to AI is concerning and falls under privacy invasion laws, which are easily evaded by leading tech giants.

This brings us to the question, are you willing to trust the most widely used platforms with sensitive information? Either you stop using the platforms, set usage-specific limits or let big fishes invade your privacy. The choice is yours.