Data watchdog queries Facebook’s audio recordings
Facebook risks another spat with EU privacy watchdogs after Bloomberg reported that the social-media giant paid contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services.
The Data Protection Commission here said it’s “seeking detailed information from Facebook on the processing in question” after the company confirmed it had been transcribing audio from users in the Messenger app.
The Irish regulator takes the lead in overseeing Facebook in Europe and is already looking at similar data processing by Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
Facebook’s lead regulator in the EU already has eight individual probes into the US social media giant, plus two into its WhatsApp subsidiary and one into Facebook-owned Instagram.
“We are now seeking detailed information from Facebook on the processing in question and how Facebook believes that such processing of data is compliant with their” obligations under the EU’s privacy rules, the Irish regulator said in a statement.
Facebook previously confirmed it had been transcribing users’ audio and said it will no longer do so, following scrutiny into other companies. Amazon, Google, Apple and now Facebook have come under fire for collecting audio snippets from consumer computing devices and subjecting those clips to human review, a practice that critics say invades privacy.
Bloomberg first reported in April that Amazon had a team of thousands of workers around the world listening to Alexa audio requests with the goal of improving the software and that similar human review was used for Apple’s Siri and by the Google Assistant.
Apple and Google have since said they no longer engage in the practice and Amazon said it will let users opt out of human review.
It’s not just the Irish regulator, where Google, Apple and Facebook have their main EU base, which has started digging deeper into possible privacy violations.
Officials in the US and elsewhere in Europe are also probing processing by human reviewers employed to listen to voice commands recorded by digital assistants.
