Facebook Are Listening...

[BIAD]

I'm alarmed... nay, shocked enough that my socks are rolling up and down as I type, that this sneaky
activity was going on! I... (stammer) I just can't believe it.

Facebook paid contractors to transcribe voice chats in Messenger app.

'Facebook has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe voice chats carried out using
the company's Messenger app, it has emerged. The contractors - many from outsourcing firm TaskUs
-were able to hear Facebook users' conversations, sometimes including "vulgar content", according to
Bloomberg.



They were not told where the audio was recorded or why it needed to be transcribed, only to transcribe it.
This led some contractors to feel their work was unethical, according to the people with knowledge of the
matter.

Facebook has confirmed the anonymous reports that it has been transcribing users’ audio, and said it will
no longer do so, following scrutiny of other companies. "Much like Apple and Google , we paused human
review of audio more than a week ago," a spokesperson for the company said.

It added that contractors were checking the accuracy of Facebook's voice-to-text service in Messenger,
which uses artificial intelligence to transcribe conversations.

Users who were affected chose to have their voice chats transcribed in Messenger and granted access
to their phone's microphone for this purpose, according to Facebook.
However, they were not informed that clips of their conversations may be subjected to human review.

Facebook's data-use policy states that its systems "automatically process content and communications
you and others provide to analyse context and what's in them."
But it includes no mention of other human beings screening the content. 

The news comes after other major tech firms including Apple, Google and Amazon have all come under
fire for their use of human workers to review voice recordings. They claim that employees listen to these
recordings in order to grade the responses of their AI voice assistants, and make them better at
understanding and replying to users.

Apple and Google have both now paused their review programmes, and Amazon has given users the ability
to opt out of having their voice recordings manually reviewed...'

SOURCE:

[Ninurta]

I, for one, am shocked. SHOCKED I tell you! Shocked and dismayed. Shocked and dismayed and appalled. And surprised. Mustn't forget surprised. How could anything like this possibly happen in a world where your every move is videoed on at least one of the thousands of video cameras watching people daily? In a world where every word you utter is recorded for posterity? In a world where your phone spies on you? Where people pay upwards of a thousand Big American Dollars for the privilege of being spied upon? That's right - not only a world in which you are spied upon, but one in which people actually PAY the spies to spy on them?

A world where people shell out otherwise perfectly good money for the privilege of inviting a robo-spy into their houses, to listen for, hang on to, and record their every word? "Alexa, do this!" Cortana, do that!" "Siri, do the other!" and Alexa, Cortana, and Siri duly and dutifully do their "owners" bidding... and record their every utterance at a far off, secure location, via the magic of Internet. And really, WHO is the owner in that dynamic?

My phone, on two separate occasions, turned itself on and just sat there, listening to me. The second time it listened for a little over two hours before I noticed it eavesdropping. For no reason I could discern, nor did I tell it to or ask. That was when I "deGoogled" it. Right then. Now, it does ONLY what God and Alexander Graham Bell expected a phone to do. It takes and makes calls. that's all. No web searching. No "location services" for GPS. No "Google store" for "apps" (what a stupid name for a program!), NOTHING but what a phone is supposed to do. Who needs "apps" if all their phone is going to do is take and make calls anyhow? I don't miss "Google Play" at all.

Know what else modern mobile phones have? Cameras! It's not enough that you are being stared at by strangers on every street corner you pass, your phone is doing it to you, too!

I don't need any "digital assistants" or a "smart house" - I'm plenty happy with my plain old "dumb house", or what we used to call back in the day a  "house" or "home". I don't need a refrigerator that spies on me and tells me when to buy groceries - hunger does that for me. I don't need a thermostat I can set via cell phone from 400 miles away - I have fingers to set my thermostat with.

Grace has NOT deGoogled her phone. She uses it to access the internet, meaning Google accesses and records everything she does. She has not disabled "location services", and the blasted thing annoys us to no end insisting from Google Central that she "take a photo" of every damned place we go, after it tells her where we are, and laments the fact that it has no photo from that location. I don't speak much inside my house, or in the jeep if her phone is also in it... but that's not really a problem. I'm pretty taciturn, and have been since long before the Wired World started tracking and monitoring my every move.

It doesn't really surprise me that Facebook and these other things do the things they do as much as the fact that the real owners of these things have convinced people to PAY THEM for the privilege of having them spy upon them.

Folks are all agoggle over Google Chrome - it's "free", what's not to love about that? I use it some times for lightweight work, but NEVER, EVER anything I have to sign into or log into. If you sign into Facebook on it, you ALSO sign into Google and Youtube. If you sign into Google - for example, sign into a Gmail account, you ALSO sign into Facebook and Youtube. If you sign into Youtube... well, you get my drift. Sign into one, sign into ALL of the companies spying on you. It's a Spook Paradise, all delivered via Google Chrome!

Welcome to the Brave New World. Huxley would have been proud... and probably scared shitless at what could be done nowadays, and what people WILLINGLY do to themselves!

I wonder how bad it will be 100 years hence?


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