Hoch Zwei / Getty Images

Voice assistants seem simple. You say something like “Alexa” or “Hey Siri” followed by a request and then — bam! — your Discover Weekly starts playing over the speaker. But a human being could be listening to everything you say — and the tech companies want to hide those people from you.

As we found out yesterday, Facebook paid outside contractors to transcribe voice memos from users who turned on chat transcription in the Messenger app. The company is the latest in a string, including Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, caught sending users’ audio to third-party firms for analysis. To experts, the news might not have come as a revelation. Among people who understand the mechanics of artificial intelligence–powered software, it’s well known that humans review verbal commands to improve speech recognition. But among the general public, there was a sense of shock: The big platforms are tapping into our microphones, and they aren’t telling us. Those reports seem to have produced changes. Today, Microsoft updated its privacy policy to explicitly say humans review user content, as a result of the practice made public by Motherboard. Facebook, meanwhile, told Bloomberg it paused human review “more than a week ago.” The Irish Data Protection Commission also launched an inquiry into the social media giant’s practices. But if it seems like the tech companies aren’t being clear with consumers, according to privacy and artificial intelligence experts, that’s because they aren’t. Most folks buying Google Homes and Echos from a mall kiosk aren’t aware. That’s in part because of the products’ “just like that!” marketing, but largely because Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook haven’t clearly told consumers what they do with their voice and video information. None of those companies’ data policies state that what we say and do in front of our voice assistants, internet-connected cameras, and messaging apps can be shown to strangers employed by the companies or their contractors. That’s bad regardless of whether or not one should expect humans to review voice commands to help train machine learning algorithms at scale. “I certainly expected that these companies would be feeding recordings to a team of annotators — but that’s only because I have a background in AI,” Jeremy Gillula, the tech policy director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News. “I don’t expect people to understand that. Companies should be making [human review] far more explicit — in their packaging materials, in their help pages, basically everywhere they talk about this product. They should say, ‘yes, honest-to-god humans can listen to what you say,’” he said.

“[The companies] should say, ‘yes, honest-to-god humans can listen to what you say.’”



Asking for the weather forecast and setting a timer don’t particularly seem to violate privacy. But wake word detection is far from perfect. Devices with voice assistants are always on, and often capture audio that wasn’t intended for them.

Reports in the last six months revealed that human reviewers heard audio snippets mistakenly captured by Amazon’s Echo smart speakers, spoken home addresses picked up by Google Assistant, and private discussions recorded by Apple’s Siri. After the stories were published, Amazon added the ability to opt out of human review in the Alexa app, but confusingly named the setting “Help Improve Amazon Services and Develop New Features.” Google introduced a similar opt-out feature, but buried it under three different menus in the Home app, in addition to suspending human review in Europe, where it may have been worried about the implications of GDPR. Apple temporarily halted its Siri contractor program and said it would let customers opt out of human review in the future.

Andrew Matthews / PA Images / Getty Images