The company secretly accumulated written transcriptions of its users' conversations, which it recorded through the microphones of smartphones.
In the past few years, the social network Facebook has been targeted by the media and government agencies due to its policy of using user data. Leaks of personal information are regularly observed, which the company does not report on time. This time, Facebook representatives said that they decoded information from users' voice messages received from their smartphones.
This information was previously provided to Bloomberg by company employees who were hired to listen and check the transcription of user conversations. The company, according to employees, has never explained why it needs text versions of customer conversations.
Facebook representatives later told Bloomberg that the transcriptions of the conversations were being used to test the performance of their artificial intelligence recognizing human speech. In fact, the company has admitted that it regularly breaches privacy. However, in the same interview, Facebook representatives claim they stopped the secret project last week.
Earlier in numerous hearings before Congress, social media CEO Mark Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook only used people's microphones when they explicitly gave permission to do so by enabling program features such as voice messaging. But company representatives never said they were sending the tapes to contractors who transcribe the voice recordings.
In its user data policy, Facebook does not mention anything about audio recordings of conversations. This fact has prompted the company's contractors to oppose the transcription of recordings from the microphones of clients, as they consider the company's actions unethical.
Nikita Shevtsov