Revealed: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls
Documents, screenshots, and audio obtained by Motherboard show that humans listen to Skype calls made using the app's translation function.
By Joseph Cox
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.
I don't see why this is news: robust mechanized translation has been unobtainium for centuries, and any effort to make it work will require frequent human intervention.
Moreover, the reporter's effort to hype the piece by adding "Revealed" to the subject and "personal conversations" to the text is proof that some things never change, least of all the habit of adding fear-words to flogging weak stories.
Bill Horne Moderator
read more and respond »Posted 5 years ago by Monty Solomon in General Telecommunications Forum
