Did Mark Zuckerberg lied to US Congress ?

There is a question raises if Facebook has been paying contractors to transcribe audio clips from its users. A question has asked by Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan cast doubt about Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony.

 

Peters’s comments, which followed a Bloomberg report that the company used the transcriptions to improve its speech-recognition technology, come as smartphones and other microphone-enabled devices become ever-more ubiquitous.

 

“I am concerned that your previous testimony before Congress appears to have been, at best, incomplete,” Peters said in a letter sent on Thursday to the Facebook CEO that requested more information about the report.

 

During Zuckerberg’s testimony in April 2018, Peters asked the CEO whether “Facebook uses audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users”, according to the senator’s letter. Zuckerberg called the notion a “conspiracy theory” and denied the company uses the audio for its ads business.

 

“Congress needs to pass tough rules that ensure that Americans don’t have our privacy repeatedly violated by unaccountable corporations,” Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement. The Oregon Democrat, who, in 2018, circulated draft legislation that would impose steep fines and even prison time for executives who fail to adequately safeguard Americans’ personal data, said Zuckerberg “must be held personally responsible for Facebook’s serial privacy offences”.

 

In response to a request for comment on Peters’ letter, a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC: “The meme that Facebook is eavesdropping on your phone in the background is absolutely false. Mark’s statements on this were true when he said them, and they remain true today. It has always been the case that Facebook only accesses your microphone if you have given our app permission and if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio. It has also always been true that Facebook does not use your phone’s microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed.”

 

Facebook is not the only company that might be affected by new privacy rules. Bloomberg reported in April that Amazon employed a team of thousands of people around the world who listened to recordings picked up by Alexa and checked them for accuracy to improve the software. Humans were also brought in to review voice assistant recordings at Alphabet’s Google and Apple, which both courted controversy for not making the practice clear to users.

 

Senator Mark Warner said the latest revelations about Facebook’s audio collection “is yet further proof that consumers’ expectations of how their data is collected and used radically differ from what companies such as Facebook are actually doing”. Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, called for legislation to require companies to disclose more detail about their data collection, use and sharing. The report says.

 

At that hearing, I asked you specifically if Facebook uses audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about its users. Your emphatic answer was no,” Peters wrote in the letter dated Aug. 15. “Your exact words to me were: ‘You’re talking about this conspiracy theory that gets passed around that we listen to what’s going on on your microphone and use that for ads. We don’t do that.

 

Peters asked Zuckerberg to respond to a series of questions by Aug. 28 to clarify for what purposes Facebook uses the audio recordings and whether users are prompted to agree to the transcription.