It turned out that Facebook had entrusted the transcription of the user's voice chat voice to an outside contractor

by Mike MacKenzie

Overseas media Bloomberg reports that Facebook has entrusted an external contractor to 'transcribe' the user's voice data into text. According to Facebook, the program was suspended on August 13, 2019.

Facebook (FB) Paid Contractors to Transcribe User Audio Files-Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-paid-hundreds-of-contractors-to-transcribe-users-audio

Facebook paid people to listen to and transcribe your voice clips
https://thenextweb.com/insider/2019/08/13/facebook-paid-people-to-listen-to-and-transcribe-your-voice-clips/

Facebook is not the first time privacy is being asked about user voice data. The user's voice data recorded by Amazon's Alexa and Google's Google Assistant was retained and employees were able to listen to the content, which was a big problem. In addition, it was regarded as a problem that Apple was analyzing voice data of users collected by Siri.

Alexa keeps `` copy '' of user voice indefinitely, it does not make sense to delete voice data-gigazine

It seems to be a problem that the Google Assistant records the conversation and the employee is listening to the contents-GIGAZINE

Facebook's Messenger app had an option to transcribe voice chat content into text, but Bloomberg reported that hundreds of contractors used transcription to improve this text conversion accuracy. The The contractor said that he was evaluating the accuracy compared to the text converted by Facebook AI while transcribing the voice data.

Facebook told Bloomberg that the data had already been anonymized before the contractor heard, claiming that there was no privacy breach. “Similar to Apple and Google, we have paused analyzing human voice data manually,” he said.

In addition, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the suspicion that he used voice data collected from users for advertising when he was witnessed by the US Senate in April 2018.