Microsoft Contractors Are Listening To Some Skype Calls (vice.com) 63
Contractors working for Microsoft are listening to personal conversations of Skype users conducted through the app's translation service, according to a cache of internal documents, screenshots, and audio recordings obtained by Motherboard. From a report: Although Skype's website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform's services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans. The Skype audio obtained by Motherboard includes conversations from people talking intimately to loved ones, some chatting about personal issues such as their weight loss, and others seemingly discussing relationship problems. Other files obtained by Motherboard show that Microsoft contractors are also listening to voice commands that users speak to Cortana, the company's voice assistant.
We are being cyberbullied by mega corporations. (Score:3, Informative)
This is dead-seriously my experience with the modern Internet as of 2019:
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None of the above is exaggerated or made up. In fact, if anything, it's toned down...
Re: We are being cyberbullied by mega corporations (Score:1)
Fyi as someone who uses aws for a work VPN, if they see your ip is coming from a cloud services they'll sometimes endless loop you in captchas. Most recently roblox had me spinning a character for like 5 minutes before I realized I was been robot holed
Understandable, but unfortunate (Score:1)
The need to train your AIs by having humans review the data is obvious to anyone who understands what's going on under the hood, or spends 5 minutes listening to how these things work.
That said, companies need to be communicating these things better with their customers. A customer should NEVER have one of their conversations listened to without knowing that it's a possibility. Hidden in the TOS isn't good enough.
Re: (Score:2)
The need to train AIs using data is obvious. Using random selections from user's private conversations without very explicit opt-IN (and even better, some sort of compensation explicitly negotiated) is far from obviously necessary.
Re: I'm not suprised (Score:1)
Um, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
While we've got some machine learning, for the most part, computers can't analyze much of anything. They can parse, do stats, flag, model, etc., but the actual analysis is still mostly done with human brains. While computers can make that task easier by doing some of the grunt work, they don't really analyze.
I'm not sure how anyone would look at the statement "the company may analyze audio of phone calls" and think that that doesn't mean humans will be listening to them. And if you're not 100% sure that you've got end-to-end encryption, why would you assume that the content of your electronic communication passing through and residing on other people's computers is private?
File this under "No Shit, Sherlock."
It would be a story if Microsoft explicitly promised not to do this, but they really did the exact opposite. They told you people would be listening.
Re: (Score:2)
Computers routinely do things that thirty years ago would have been the stuff of science fiction. If you asked me in 1989 whether I'd see a system with the scale and performance of Google's search engine, and that it would be available to everyone for free in just ten years, I'd have thought that was a pipe dream.
It's a fair bet that we nerds are in for more surprises about things that turn out to be practical. You can hardly expect non-technical people to have anything but the vaguest idea of what's feasib
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How to do computer human analysis. The person listens in on your conversation once and types in the appropriate targeted words to associate them with your spoken words and done, from there on in the computer analyses your speech. Everyone was told what kind of cunts M$ are and were warned to drop Skype when those privacy invasive shit heads bought it and voila, the worse and in fact in old worlde terms criminal invasion of privacy. Listen in to your conversations once, to program the AI so that it can liste
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Quit watching 24 hour news stations, people don't act like what they tell you people act like. I'm left and I don't think like you think I think nor do any of my lefty friends. I even own several guns including the dreaded "assault rifle" and I'm the biggest socialist liberal you'll ever meet.
Re: (Score:2)
Here is how they Divide and conquer the masses to pass their laws:
Anti-gun Politicians say they’re not against the use of firearms for all purposes. They say they’re against the use of firearms for some purposes. Like self-defense.
Anti-gun politicians claim they’d never dream of prohibiting guns. They’re only trying to control guns.
Anti-gun politicians claim they’re not prohibiting guns. They
Ridiculous breech of privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
Same with soundbytes from Alexa / Siri / etc.
Whoever keeps designing these systems with blatant privacy violations needs to be strung up.
The rules in the Chinese room are under dev. (Score:2, Insightful)
Although Skype's website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform's services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans.
Omg, wtf did they think this meant? That occasionally the AI translation would be fed to an even better AI translator?
More Open Source Solutions, Please! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The "brand" would just connect the calls and do the GUI/crypto. No more supernodes.
What a good thing for privacy such a new system would be
qung cáo tây ninh (Score:1)
It’s in the name (Score:1)
Really? (Score:2)
"Microsoft contractors are also listening to voice commands that users speak to Cortana, the company's voice assistant."
Both of them?
Hello... it's me again, (Score:2)
Margaret.
Time to confuse the whole thing by making nonsense calls!
Comment removed (Score:3)
Next time you're near one of Microsoft's offices (Score:2)
The next time you're near one of MS's offices, go right in, find the break room and have a cup of coffee. After all, since you have most likely somehow contributed to their profits at some point (perhaps not even explicitly, you might have paid the MS tax on a PC you installed Linux on for example), according to their reasoning, you're entitled to it.
Be sure to check conference rooms for free doughnuts.
Do you want Privacy or Cool Services? Pick One. (Score:2)
People, this contradiction among the American populace is head-spinning. Yes, they love the ability to live-translate a call into text! But NO!
"Don't listen to my calls!... But I want that live-translate feature!"
Good lord, most people are freaking dumb when it comes to electronics. These computers are not able to learn how to give useful data to humans by themselves. They HAVE to collect data to be able to interpret and provide good services.
This crap is a double-edged sword. Yes, you can have something li
Skype used to be private (Score:4, Informative)
Fake News (Score:2)
This is yet another piece of fake news.
The truth is they're listening to ALL Skype calls.