After years of backlash from the public as well as the goverment, one would think that Facebook would get its act together and apply an ethical practice over collection and use of user data, but it seems the reality is just the opposite.
I guess, data is the new gold in 21st century and big corporations will do anything to get their hands on as much of it and in any manner as possible, blurring the lines of ethics and legality.
Just in the past year, many large corporations, including Apple, Google and Amazon, have all been reported to record user conversations with the virtual assistants on their phones, smart watches or smart speakers.
Facebook, though, goes a step ahead and records audio of people through the microphones in their phones. I had written about this very thing several months ago where several people had noticed that the products they had talked about with people in person, appeared as advertisements on Facebook soon after. This suspicion is now all but confirmed.
Third Party Contractors Disclose All
Similar to other companies, Facebook seems to have paid third-party contractors to listen in on and transcribe Facebook Messenger users' conversations. These details were disclosed by the contracters while speaking to Bloomberg. They also mentioned that occasionally, the conversations were of a vulgar kind.
To clarify this, Facebook then told Bloomberg that the transcriptions were done to test the performance of their AI powered speech recognition technology, which put to rest any doubts that skeptics might have had.
The idea that a company, who doesn't even manufacture the phone you are using, is able to hear your private conversations, and employ real human beings to listen those conversations is disturbing to say the least. Who's to say that this data was not also used immediately to target individuals for ads.
Although Facebook has also said that they have stopped this project last week, I for one do not trust them one bit. The bigger issue is that as all aspects of our lives are going digital in the modern world, it will be easier than ever for these big corporations to collect every single data about us. It seems like privacy will be a concept of the past soon.