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. 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.
This might sound familiar, as Amazon, Apple and Google have all been found to listen to voice assistant queries. Apple recently suspended its program that had people listen to conversations with Siri, and Amazon now lets users opt-out of the program that let people review your Alexa recordings.
In a statement provided to Vice, Microsoft said: “We strive to be transparent about our collection and use of voice data to ensure customers can make informed choices about when and how their voice data is used. Microsoft gets customers’ permission before collecting and using their voice data.”
At this point, what might be most surprising isn’t that companies are using contractors to listen to conversations, but that so many contractors are leaking the recordings and transcribed documents. Still, we’ll see if Microsoft suspends this program or offers an opt-out, as Apple and Amazon have done.
