Facebook had human contractors 'reviewing' users' Messenger voice chats

http://www.rt.com/usa/466439-facebook-ends-contractor-review-messenger/
Date Written:  2019-08-14
Publisher:  RT
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23773

Facebook has given contractors access to people's private voice chats for transcription purposes.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Facebook says it has stopped feeding users' audio chats to human reviewers for transcription, similar to what other Big Tech were recently caught doing. Facebook's contractors were reportedly kept in the dark about their job....

Contractors often caught snippets of intimate or "vulgar" chats, though the messages were anonymized, and they were not told why they were transcribing the audio, where it came from or how it was obtained, contractors told Bloomberg. Some said the uncertainty and apparent duplicity – Facebook doesn’t tell users third parties may review their audio – troubled them....

Further adding to contractors' concerns about eavesdropping on users' private messages is the fact that Facebook forbids at least one outsourcing firm from referring to them by name. Santa Monica, California-based TaskUs instead refers to one of its largest and most important clients only by the code-name "Prism" – which is, ironically, also the name of the NSA initiative exposed by Edward Snowden that installed backdoors in popular online platforms like Google, Skype, Twitter, and…Facebook.