Until recently, Facebook conducted human private audio reviews of Messenger to improve transcriptions of artificial intelligence systems.US Democratic Senator Gary Peters on Thursday asked the head of Facebook Inc. to answer questions about his testimony before Congress in April 2018 in light of reports that Facebook captured user audio and sent it to a provider for analysis and transcription. "I specifically asked him if Facebook uses audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users. His emphatic answer was no," Peters wrote in a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "If these reports are accurate, I am concerned that your previous testimony before Congress seems, at best, incomplete." Facebook did not comment immediately.The letter noted that Facebook then sent written responses to Congress that it actually has access to users' audio when they have opted for and used a specific Facebook service. However, Peters said that, in the follow-up responses, the company did not articulate what it does with the audio accessed in those circumstances, the extent of the use of this practice by Facebook or the reasons for the discrepancy in your testimony on this subject during the hearing.
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The Data Protection Commission of Ireland, the main regulator of Facebook in the European Union, said Wednesday that it was looking for information on how the company handled the data during the manual transcription of users' audio recordings. The commission already has eight individual probes in the US social media company. UU., Two in its subsidiary of WhatsApp and one in Instagram, owned by Facebook. "Like Apple and Google, we stopped the human audio review more than a week ago," Facebook said earlier this week.According to the privacy rules of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, regulators can fine offenders up to 4 percent of a company's global income or 20 million euros ($ 22 million), whichever is greater .Until recently, Facebook conducted human personal audio reviews from its courier application to enhance transcriptions of AI systems, however no EU user was affected, the corporate same on.
The audio clips in question were masked to avoid revealing anyone's identity and the company never heard people's microphones without explicit activation, a Facebook representative said in an email on Wednesday, adding that human reviews were common. in the industry.Facebook has round-faced widespread criticism from lawmakers and regulators regarding their privacy practices and received criticism when Bloomberg rumored weekday that Facebook used external contractors to transcribe the videos.Last month, the company agreed to a $ 5 billion privacy agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission. UU. The agreement is awaiting court approval.